When creating HLODs for worlds that’s not using World Partition, there are these three methods under Simplification Method: merge, simplify and approximate. I am guessing that these kind of are the equivalent settingon to Layer type (Instancing, Merge Mesh and Simplified mesh)
when using World Partition.

But, I am wondering what does the merge, simplify and approximate actually do? There is nothing about them in the documentation.
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This is what I got so far from combing the internet and lots of tests:
The Simplification Method is a Mesh Generation Setting and specifies how the proxy mesh should be generated and how simplified it should be. There are three different layer types to chose from when creating HLODs; Merge, Simplify and Approximate. They all provide different settings which helps you define how they should work.
- Merge: Combines multiple meshes into a single mesh (merging them) without reducing polygon count. It is ideal for imposter meshes where the polycount is already low because this only reduces draw calls, not triangle amount. Merge is the default Simplification method.
- Selecting Merge will expose a dropdown menu called Merge Settings. This includes settings for the merge
- Simplify: Merges the meshes together and then simplifies them by reducing the polygon count of the merged mesh.
- Selecting Simplify will expose a dropdown menu called Proxy Settings. This includes settings for the to-be-generated Proxy meshes.
- Approximate: Approximate is a more aggressive simplification that prioritizes performance over visual accuracy. This method merges the meshes together and reduces the polygon count more aggressively then Simplify. The proxy mesh that is a rough approximation of the original geometry and has less visual quality than Simplify, but it is more optimized.
- Selecting Approximate will expose a dropdown menu called Approximate Settings. This includes settings for the approximated proxy mesh.
NOTE: Changing any of these settings requires you to rebuild the proxy mesh, either through Generate Proxy Meshes or Build All in the Hierarchical LOD Outliner.