Topic: Models/texture colse to distance, question

[Littlemeister]

I have been wondering a long time why 3d engines needs different models for different distances. Im not shure if Lumion have this problem, but I have seen this problem in all game engines out there.

Its not only the model itself.. but the texture to... and Im jusst curious to why there havent been a fix for this... And im always thinking of The webbrowsers in the beginning.
Every time a webbrowser should load an image it loaded it from the top and down... Then Some years ago it changed. And now it doesnt matter if its an 1mb picture or 100mb picture... It will render it to look better and better and better... rendering the whole image like it has many layers. Making a quick render first and filling on with better quality up to the maximum for that picture after a second of two. 

So.. lets say you could put in really high textures for all your models in the scene... but the engine would only try to render the textures close with full Power... and the texture in the distance would get less render? ..

[Morten]

This function is implemented in pretty much every real-time 3D engine, including in Lumion (the technique is known as mipmapping):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

[Littlemeister]

Thx for the answear. May I ask."Unlimited detail" uses a technic to only grab the pixels needed for your resolution.. I have no idea if its better than what Lumion got or if its worse... But as a selling point it shure sounds good. Can we get your thoughts on this (new?) technic?
is this the future? or is it even better?