3DS MAX UNWRAP PRO FULL
3DS MAX UNWRAP PRO PRO

Say you have a tube with 6 sides, and it bends with an interpolation of 3. But I would recommend as someone said here to go into Edit Poly mode and manually reduce the poly's for LOD2 from LOD1.

Pro-Optimize might be OK for LOD3 and 4 (just look at how sculpties load up). You can also make your finished texture(s) for the highest level, and use them to align the UV mapping for the other levels. In the other levels you can set that texture as a background in the Edit UVWs window, to help align your maps at the other levels. * In the Edit UVWs window, you can use Tools menu > Render UVW Template from the high LOD model, and export the UV map as a texture. Those will help keep them in place when you make changes for each LOD.

3DS MAX UNWRAP PRO PRO

There are checkboxes both in the Editable Poly and Pro Optimizer modifiers to preserve UV's. * You can 'bake' the UV coordinates to your geometry by collapsing the 'Editable Poly' and 'Unwrap UVW' modifiers together in the Command Panel > Modify tab. Couple of things I can point out if you are fairly new to 3ds Max: So there is no simple answer to your question. So in that case I have to do each level separately. Since you need the number of material IDs the same at all LOD levels, that means having some hidden triangles at both the high and lowest LOD to hold the alpha texture and main plant texture respectively.

That is a couple of flat planes with a rendered alpha texture of the plant. For other things, like the small plants I have been making, I use a 'billboard' for the lowest LOD. For some objects, the auto-LOD within the upload window does a decent job of reducing the triangles, and it will map the UV coordinates reasonably well. It depends what your model is how you do the LOD's. Personally, I find it definitely worth the hassle of manually creating the LOD meshes and their UVs to retain complete control of how they deform over distance (instead of the totally random auto LODs generated by the uploader). You'd be surprised at how much a good texture will 'fill in' the missing geometry details for lower LODs at distance. You won't get a perfect fit over your texture UV, but near enough is often good enough for long distance viewing. If the lower LODs are reduced in triangle count, it isn't too much a hassle to UVmap them. What I do is use the existing UV layout of the main LOD1 mesh as a guide (it's easier if it already has a texture made for it for visibility), and just create the UVmap for each LOD mesh by overlaying it. This is still tedious, but not as bad as redoing the mesh from total scratch each time (at least for me, anyway).

3DS MAX UNWRAP PRO FULL

I generally create my full detail mesh intended for LOD1, and UV-map it etc as per normal.ДЇor the lower LODs, I simple reduce the triangle counts in the original mesh, trying as much as possible to keep a recognisable shape - the further out you are, where each LOD kicks in, you will see less detail, so you can trim and merge triangles a fair bit.

I don't work with 3ds, but my general workflow should translate anyway.

3ds max unwrap pro