Finding assets with appropriate LOD levels

In the process of building Salem on my Bear Creek & South Jackson route, I'm planting a LOT of houses.
Being ignorant of such things I was just grabbing houses that looked good to me.
Then I opened preview on a few houses, such as the Farm House 1 (iirc) asset in the Content Manager Preview window and checked out the number of triangles in the LOD levels.
I was chagrined (or maybe dismayed) to discover that this house appeared to not have any lower detail LOD levels. At least neither moving closer/farther from the object nor manually selecting a LOD level resulted in any change in the number of triangles associated with that object (some other objects do have multiple LOD triangle counts).

That got me thinking that especially for houses further away from the tracks that screening assets for triangle counts (or rather lack of triangle counts - lol) would be a good idea. Perhaps creating Picklist entires "houses - hides" and "houses - blind" to make it easy to remember which is which...

However I'm not looking forward to wading through every stinking' (and those that smell nice too) house/factory/tree/bush/etc asset in the Content Manager Preview Window, then adding an entry to a spreadsheet for each asset with # of triangles for each LOD.

I don't suppose there's some way to add some extra columns to the Content Manager display to show: number of LOD levels and triangles for each level?

That would make building an efficient (triangle-wise) route much easier.

I remember reading about an alternate technique where a large number of objects are placed on an otherwise empty baseboard and FPS (for a given cpu and cpu) is recorded. The higher the FPS, the "leaner" the model. This would also account for texture costs and vertex costs as well as the direct triangle costs.

What do all your experienced route builders do to solve this problem?

Thanks,
Horace Fithers (who wants more than 20fps out of Salem with an rtf 2080 ti!)

I agree. This would be a worthwhile information addition to CM.

The number of LOD levels is (as far as I know) in the config.txt file so it should(?) be a relatively simple matter for CM to pull that information out. The Triangle Count and the No of Draw Calls are in there somewhere as the Preview Asset option displays them (probably calculated from the mesh, etc) so they may not be as quick to pull out.

But a good idea never-the-less.

Not really a complete solution to your problem, but:
Assets with a build starting at TANE level (so 4.1 or so) are required to have LOD when having over 500 triangles.

Edit:
Houses with build 3.6 or higher with a LOD problem should at least give you a warning, so you could relatively easy exclude those.

Good idea, Horace.

If you are using the asset preview a lot and you have a programmable mouse or keyboard you should consider setting a button to call the key sequence of the command to show the preview. It makes it a lot easier to preview a lot of assets in a row. I have one key to open the preview and one to close it. Alt + F4 to close the window.

William