In the summer of 2020 I presented a virtual talk at GDC, the Game Developers Conference. I was originally slated to give the talk to a live audience in San Francisco, but in the end I recorded the talk in my study.
As part of my day job at EA I led the development of a sophisticated tool for procedural generation of Levels of Detail, which are simplified versions of artist-authored mesh models for use when the model is viewed (in game) from far away. Traditionally artists authored these additional, low-res, meshes by hand. Today many 3rd party software tools exist for generating them automatically — some of them very well.
We started work on our own tool around half a decade ago, and it was probably unique in the industry at that time. Unlike 3rd party tools, ours was developed specifically for character models. These tend to be more carefully authored than other models (eg. scenery) due to having a very specific topology.