Thanks for your patience and the info! What really threw me was expecting to see a list of LODs in Details just like in the tutorial, but they were not there, as I said I think the tutorial was made on a previous version of UE. Knowing the LODs are all stored and in the same mesh, resolved my primary confusion, and I finally figured out that just by assigning a LOD group like “small prop” creates the LODs and that appears as a single mesh in the editor. And while in the editor, if you move the camera away from it, you’ll see the LODs functioning, I was making it much more complicated than it is, not helped by the documentation for this which appears to be a couple versions old. 
1 Like