The problem

at the time of building this system, unreal had released a cool new feature of creating hlods for large worlds

it looked cool in the demos, but in reality it was very buggy - after looking at the source code it became clear that it was indeed still in a quite experimental state

with a game where you can see far into the horizon, not having hlods is a bit of a problem

The approach

all that was really needed was to get a low poly batched version of the world that looks “close enough” to the actual thing:

• make a grid of cameras pointing straight down to the world, and render out height/material data
• convert them into a grid of hlod meshes
• simply toggle the visibility based on the distance from the player

The end result

an extremely simple hlod system