Showing LODs from miles

[Ana Aref]

Hi my CFR that i created disappears when I get really far and my LOD level in the setting the highest it can get. Unlike other rides like FC-StarFlyer It can be seen from miles. pls help me

[FrancesCoaster]

It's not something you do in the importer, it's the ratio between the poly count and the size of the object that influences how far your item stays visible. your item has to be either very low poly or very big in terms of footprint for it to render from far away. My Starflyer for example heavily relies on alpha textures for the tower and part of the gondola, so it's very low poly. If I remember right, one section of tower track is around 100 faces.

Sometimes sketchup likes to mess up models, especially when exploding meshes, creating tons of completely unnecessary polys, by splitting edges and faces on every intersection.

Example, imagine two flat rectangular meshes, that overlap each other. Rct3 considers poly as triangular meshes, so as long as they are separated groups the polys are as follows, it's only 4 faces.

 

After exploding, sketchup calculates all intersections and fill the meshes with triangles to "fill" the meshes. Now, your mesh will have 20 faces, depsite looking the same in rct3.

 

Now imagine that on 3d meshes, with much more intersections... You get the point.

I know some older CFRs creators that used a very brute method to avoid disappearing ingame depsite their very poorly optimized models:
Basically they used to fill a very large space around the CFR with invisible meshes. The game will think it's a very large object and won't hide the CFR.

The downside of it is that clicking on some empty spot in the game, for example while deleting trees, will select the CFR, even if it's far away off screen.

[Kablary]

Hey there, I know the pain of having an item VANISH on you when you least want it to. From what I understand, the draw distance is determined when the attraction is being put through the importer. That's why some CFRs or scenery items can be seen from a maximum distance and others cannot. 

Having never attempted to make my own custom content for RCT3, I unfortunately can't tell you how to fix it, other than there is likely a setting or value in whatever program you used to import the attraction. Maybe @FrancesCoaster or can weigh in here?

[wolfpaw]

Kablary is right, this is determined by the CS importer I believe. I too don't create CS but there are others who can for sure help you out on this forum and answer that with more details!