The distant LOD created by TES4LODGen with RAEVWD doesn't do a good job of rendering the rock cliffs for The Lost Coast. There are lots of pop-ins, trees that floating in the air because they are placed on rocks that have no LOD, etc. This is particularly pronounced just when you leave Anvil, round the lighthouse, and sail west. The very impressive "Beacon Rock" just has no LOD.
For a while I thought this was user-error (not an uncommon occurrence), but then I realized RAEVWD must not have the _far.nif files for the cliffs, or rather the objects they're composed of. There are a number of objects being used, of course, to construct the cliffs; however, it looks like 'RockUnderwater970' is the major component and is used all along the coast (you'd probably represent 80%+ of the cliff detail from just that one object type).
So I guess I have two questions:
1) I assume that creating a _far.nif for the 'RockUnderwater970' object would make TES4LODGen create .lod's that include that object. Is there a somewhat easy-to-use tool to create an appropriately polygon-reduced _far.nif?
2) Judging from the object name, presumably there are lots of these rocks under the water where the distantlod does no good. Is TES4LODGen smart about handling that (ignores objects entirely under the surface), or would this be a big performance drain if the object is everywhere under the sea?