== Why use multiple levels of detail ==
The reasons to use levels-of-detail (LODs) in Mutable are the same reaons you would use them for other game assets: memory usage, processor performance and loading time. In Mutable you can take adventage of its procedural construction of characters to optimise even more by creating specific diagrams for each LOD. This way, you can have objects like the base character body that follow the usual LOD optimisation, by simply lowering the polycount and texture sizes on each LOD, but you can also go beyond this and define different construction process for each LOD using cheaper operations as the object is further away.
As an example lets imagine a character bracelet. In the top LOD used during close-ups, the bracelet has its own mesh and complex materials with physics animation. For the second LOD it may be simplified by replacing it with a riogid mesh with a single material directly skinned to the arm bone. The third LOD may be just a texture patch on the arm (if the bracelet is big enough). In the fourth LOD it may have disappeared completely. You can define all this cases in different diagrams using the same parameters, so if the bracelet colour was customizable, you could see it change on every LOD.
== Defining the levels of detail of an object ==
== Automatic level of detail ==