But, you should make sure you need to do it before you go to all that trouble. If your model only has say 1000 polygons to begin with, it's quite possible that making a bunch of lower detail versions isn't going to increase speed at all. Each model has a base cost for rendering it regardless of the number of polygons. Or more specifically, each surface in each model. The polygons contribute only a little time each, so you might have to have 1000 just to equal the cost of the one surface alone, and halving the number of polygons might only reduce the cost of rendering the model to 75%.
These are all just guesses of course.
I made a foliage system which got around this issue by combining meshes in the distance to reduce the surface count as well as reducing the polygons, but that resulted in the use of tons of video memory for storing the meshes, as every single tree on the terrain had to be a unique mesh, so it was only good for relatively small maps.
These are all just guesses of course.
I made a foliage system which got around this issue by combining meshes in the distance to reduce the surface count as well as reducing the polygons, but that resulted in the use of tons of video memory for storing the meshes, as every single tree on the terrain had to be a unique mesh, so it was only good for relatively small maps.