I read all your comments with interest. I’ve struggled with this in my scenery efforts, and maybe I can contribute something related to scenery (I don’t know anything about airplane models, though):
I’m building bridges of all kinds, and I need them to be detailed up close, but I no longer need that detail past about 1 km. My bridges necessarily take up a lot or real estate, because I also model the approach roadways. Therefore my models are really big with respect to buildings. I use Blender and trim sheets, so the poly count is quite low at the highest res. However, at one km I get rid of the walkway fences, the light poles, the guard rails and the rivets (from a trim sheet, of course).
The really big jump in lowering detail comes at the last LOD model: In the case of a bridge, I create a few rectangular solids - nothing at all like a bridge but occupying or, you might say, forming shells around the biggest pieces. Then I go back to my LOD00 model, set up several cameras and “photograph” it in profile and plan views against a black background. In Blender I set the camera to orthographic projection and frame the picture with the camera lens scale slider. (Lock Camera to View doesn’t work in ortho mode.) I illuminate the model evenly with at least three lights. I save each render as a .png with an alpha channel for later.
This gives me image textures I can use on the flat walls of my rectangular solids. If it was a hangar, I’d stop there.
In the case of a bridge of almost any kind, however, I go into some photo processor (I use Krita), and I edit the black, open spaces to transparency in the alpha channel. Now, when I paste these images onto the outsides of my rectangular objects, you can see through the holes. I the blender2MSFS toolkit, I set the alpha mode to dither and, usually, the material tick box to two-sided.
The sim does a terribly intelligent thing: as you move farther away from or closer to the object, the transition from one LOD model to another “fades in”; there is little apparent “jump”.
I hope this helps someone out there. I’m still learning.
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