The MSFS 2024 LOD system changes have been hotly debated here but I’ve not come across anyone reporting an issue that’s affecting our Black Square aircraft, the Starship in this example.
We’ve noticed that very small objects in the cockpit (LOD 0) can disappear despite being close to the user, e.g. on the main instrument panel. For example, the LED inside the switches, and the white dots on the softkeys shown in this image (they are separate models, since they have small emissive materials):
Even after carefully optimizing, different lighting conditions can reveal culled objects that would be otherwise unnoticeable, allowing light to penetrate the panel:
the only solution i came up with was to merge those parts to a bigger one
luckily you can have multiple Materials per object so this “(they are separate models, since they have small emissive materials)” seperation in the model
isnt really necessary
while the culling on vertices has been well documented, i have found nothing on what appears to be this culling by size yet- short of using the invisible mesh trick, merging is the only thing i could come up with on tiny parts (this has the added benefit of using less drawcells for performance)
Very small objects are culled when their screen size in % of the total surface goes below a certain threshold for optimization purposes.
I am surprised it affects your top left switch as they are usually too big to be culled. Is it split in multiple objects?
Multiple way to address this:
group objects whenever possible
use multi material → your small LED mesh should be merged with the button one and use a different material ID
use fake geometry to prevent light bleeding where it shouldn’t → backplate behind the culled knobs for example
Thanks for the reply and clarification regarding the optimisation process.
We reported the issue as it wasn’t something that we had encountered in MSFS 2020 when using the same model. While we have a working solution for now using the methods that you’ve outlined, having to look for individual shafts of light in the cockpit from disappearing meshes, and then applying a fix that breaks hierarchy in Blender is not a particularly efficient solution for the artist. Appreciate that it doesn’t affect every cockpit/model though.
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