Make Mesh LOD transitions smooth

Cross-fading is a technique that makes the transitions between LODs smooth and lets you avoid a visible switchover from one LODThe Level Of Detail (LOD) technique is an optimization that reduces the number of triangles that Unity has to render for a GameObject when its distance from the Camera increases. More info
See in Glossary to another.

With this technique, Unity renders both the current and the next LODs separately, and then blends them together:

Unity implements the cross-fading effect by using either screen-space dithering or transparency.

Enable LOD cross-fading

To enable LOD cross-fading:

1. In the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) Asset, enable LOD Cross Fade.

2. Enable GPU Resident Drawer. This feature is required for cross-fading to work when using MeshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info
   See in Glossary LOD.

If your project uses the Built-In Render Pipeline, go to Project Settings > Quality > Level of Detail, and enable the LOD Cross Fade property.

Additional resources

• Import a mesh with LOD settings.