I can't help but to wonder why more engines, like Unity don't implement this, since it seems like a game changer in some specific scenarios. Unreal's Nanite, for example, generated a lot of attention for this exact reason (being more advanced than Godot's offering, but covering at least a few similar use cases).
Of course, ideally you'd take the models that you need and feed them through some retopo solution to generate slightly lower poly meshes (if you don't actually want to show all of the details for the screws etc.), even a Blender modifier might be useful here, even though it might give worse results than doing things by hand: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers...
But in lieu of that, LODs might just make the runtime performance passable, though the settings you'd need would be pretty niche - only showing the highest level of detail inches away from the model, or something like that. It doesn't really solve editor performance per se, though.
I can't help but to wonder why more engines, like Unity don't implement this, since it seems like a game changer in some specific scenarios. Unreal's Nanite, for example, generated a lot of attention for this exact reason (being more advanced than Godot's offering, but covering at least a few similar use cases).
Of course, ideally you'd take the models that you need and feed them through some retopo solution to generate slightly lower poly meshes (if you don't actually want to show all of the details for the screws etc.), even a Blender modifier might be useful here, even though it might give worse results than doing things by hand: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers...
But in lieu of that, LODs might just make the runtime performance passable, though the settings you'd need would be pretty niche - only showing the highest level of detail inches away from the model, or something like that. It doesn't really solve editor performance per se, though.