Planet LOD
Here you can see the new Level-of-detail feature in action! This sphere has 2 sublevels. The sublevels get loaded in the background so they will plop-in. The lod is selected based on distance. Sadly at the moment the loading and the rendering use the same distance. It would make sense to start loading a bit earlier.
When loaded the meshes stay in the cache and are then appearing immediately. What you can see in the end of the movie.
The ‚planet‘ does not use any height information. So it is only a sphere at the moment.
This special sphere is constructed from a cube so the top mesh uses a cubemap.
The subquads will later get a 2d texture as material. As each subquad is a seperate mesh it could be replaced by any other mesh. In lower levels this can be used E.g. to create caves etc.