Imposters Support?
As an alternative to an automatic LOD generation for individual assets, could Imposters perhaps be implemented in their stead?
https://shaderbits.com/blog/octahedral-impostors/
With the advent of the new Shader-Graph situation, I would think this would be in the cards for LOD, right? D:
PS: I just wanted to yell from the top of my lungs that YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!!! -- Thanks for looking into this LOD stuff! -- I've been wanting to make larger worlds, but Unity has been very adament about crushing my dreams on this... :(
Well, I don't necessarily see it as much an alternative to LOD generation as part of the LOD chain generation. So, instead of the lowest LODs (e.g. LOD3) being a mesh it would use an impostor instead. It wouldn't be too hard to add support to AutoLOD to use specific LOD simplifiers (as we call them) at different parts in the LOD chain. So, mesh simplifiers for everything but the final LOD.
I did a quick search to see if there was a Unity implementation and found one here: https://github.com/xraxra/IMP
All that would be needed from that project is to implement the IMeshSimplifier interface to hook it in. My time available to contribute to this project is mainly on maintenance or to support others to add support, so it'd be great if someone wants to do this work. I'll tag this issue for now with the "help wanted" label.
Thank you for your encouragement and appreciation.