[Adding LOD to the Model Class]

Josh are you attending Siggraph this year?

[Building a Zero-Overhead Renderer]

I think it's important to keep trudging forward with newer hardware.  AMD's affordable core act (RYZEN) means 6 and 8 core CPUs (with 12 and 16 threads) are going to be the norm in the coming years, because intel has had to adapt to their pricing and offering, so are likewise offering more cores for cheaper.  We already saw them move coffee lake to 6 cores after a decade of quad cores.  So to me, offering to leverage this in your core engine is going to be a strong selling point and get developer attention.

AMD has a 15w, mobile 4 core 8 thread CPU.  It's getting heated out there on the CPU front.  As soon as miners stop buying all the GPUs, I think we're going to see some trading blows over the next year starting from this summer.

Offering Vulkan support out of the box is going to turn a lot of heads as well, especially if it's well done.

Good work Josh.  Looking forward to playing with Leadwerks on my 8 core AMD and RX Vega =)

[Multithreaded Rendering]

Doom Vulkan results are probably better on AMD.  It seems that nvidia hardware is better on DX11 and OpenGL, more traditional rendering methods.

You'll find AMD performing a bit better on Vulkan and DX12, in most cases though.

[Blender Character Rig]

The Mixamo auto rigger seems to work pretty well. You can get 2 free auto rigs a week just by having an account with them. You can't accumulate them though (limited to 2). But still, for an indie project, I doubt you'd be rigging more than that (esp since you can just recycle the skeleton for similar meshes).