Panda3D: Baking Fade LODs into Models

Panda3D supports two different LOD transitions by default: popping and fading. Popping is when the LOD models immediately switch out when they’re far enough from the camera. Fading adds in a lerp to smoothen out this transition sequence. Interestingly enough, almost all Pirates of the Caribbean Online Panda models have LOD nodes, and all of the ones I’ve seen use a fade LOD transition that’s baked into the file itself.

I figured out this by complete accident, and I don’t think there’s any sort of post anywhere that explains about this.

When a model has a baked-in LOD, the type of LOD transition it uses is defined upon the egg2bam creation process. If you have the following in your Panda3D config file, this should automatically bake in fade LODs into all your LOD models:

default-lod-type fade
lod-fade-time 2.0

lod-fade-time can be any float value, by the way.