From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Defining polygon-level detail

Defining polygon-level detail - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Defining polygon-level detail

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- [Instructor] Level of detail is an important concept in polygon modeling that is confused with and related to a concept called fidelity. Fidelity is how well a 3D model visually resembles the thing it's trying to represent. How accurate is that representation, just visually to our eyes? Level of detail, on the other hand, really refers just to how heavy the object is, how dense it is, the number of polygons on the object, its actual polygon count. And these two ideas are related inasmuch as, sometimes, increasing the level of detail will increase the fidelity, but not always. And it's important to know when and how to increase level of detail, because if you increase level of detail beyond the capabilities of whatever system, you're going to encounter performance issues. For example, your shot may take too long to render or your game may run too slowly to be playable, and so on. So level of detail is a super important idea. I'm going to use this monitor stand to illustrate that. In…

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