LOD Forge generates clean Level-of-Detail chains in Blender — without breaking UV seams, material boundaries, or silhouette edges. Built for real Unity and Unreal pipelines.

WHY LOD FORGE ============= The default Decimate modifier merges UV islands, collapses material borders, and flattens silhouettes — your distant LODs end up with stretched textures and a melted-looking outline.

LOD Forge analyses the source mesh first, builds a protection vertex group, and feeds it inverted to the decimator. Important edges stay, the rest gets reduced. The result hits your triangle budget and still looks like the asset.

FEATURES ======== • 4 ready presets — Desktop / Mobile × Character / Environment / Prop • Up to 6 LOD levels with per-level triangle budgets • Iterative budget targeting — re-decimates until the target is hit • Feature protection — UV seams, material boundaries, silhouette edges • Engine naming profiles — Unity (_LODGroup), Unreal (_LODs), Custom • Batch mode — entire scenes in one click • Preview cycling — flip between LOD0..LODn in the viewport • Metrics panel — triangles, reduction %, budget pass/fail • Clean removal — restore the original mesh and clear empties

COMPATIBILITY ============= • Blender 3.2 and later (tested on 3.6 and 4.2) • Unity Built-in / URP / HDRP — drop the FBX into a LODGroup component • Unreal 4 / 5 — auto-LOD via the _LODs naming convention

WHAT YOU GET ============ • LOD Forge addon (Python only, no DLL) • README with quick-start guide • Free updates for v1.x • Support through marketplace messaging

INSTALL ======= Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install... → pick the ZIP → enable. Sidebar tab "LODForge" appears in the 3D Viewport.

LICENSE ======= GPL-3.0. Standard for Blender add-ons. You may use the result in any project, commercial or otherwise. ```

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