I'm having a problem understanding Object LODs and hoping someone can clear things up for me.

I've placed a structure/home adjacent to Megaton in the exterior wastelands. I noticed when viewing from a good distance the structure is no longer visible yet Megaton is.
Based on this info:
http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/World_LOD

I assume I need to create a new LOD object for the newly created structure to solve this issue. I understand the process described in that link....where I become confused is - Do I have to do this only for my newly created structures OR do I have to redo this for all objects, both new and existing in that particular cell?

If the latter is true, that is really a nightmare. I can't see a modder doing this huge process just for adding a building or two....yet I see plenty of mods on nexus that add new exterior buildings. :confused:

I'm hoping that I am wrong and that it only applies to terrain/landscape editing.

No you're not wrong. In order to add an LOD object for just a single addition, you're going to have to re-render the entire Wasteland, not just the cell it's in.

Holy $*5^T! That really blows. And did I read you correctly? - the ENTIRE wasteland, not just the already humongous cell? The process involves extracting all of the meshes and textures and then converting all of the textures to .TGA format. Hell no for me. Well then it is safe to say none of the mods on nexus that do this (unless its a newly created worldspace) have LODs at all.

Oh well looks like I have to abandon my mod and stick to interior stuff.

Thanks for your response.

Yes you read that right. In order to add just a single VWD object, you'll have to re-render all the objects for the entire Wasteland. They all use the same texture file and everything has to appear there in the proper order or your textures will come out all screwed up. Most of the VWD meshes are combined as well, though not in a single file like the textures. They're grouped into several files, but still combined to a large degree. The actual rendering doesn't really take all that much time, but there's alot of preliminaries you have to go through before you can even do that. If you're still interested, CevSteel uploaded a package with all the preliminary files you need to get to the rendering stage on the Nexus. I forget what's called but you should be able to find it with some common sense search terms. I've never had any luck with that process myself. Everytime I've tried it, my textures ended up being totally messed up. I finally gave up on the idea.