Collision LOD ?

I was wondering if there is a variable which sets lod for collision. For example i'd like the collision engine to always use the model's LOD3 so the engine doesn't have to check that many polygons for collision.
We are rendering huge amounts of modelclusters in our game, and polygon collision slows everything down (there's ~90k polys which all have my.polygon set). We can't use box collision as we are using said clusters. And we can't get rid of the clusters, as we will get an INSANE fps drop when not using clustered models (i'd kill for instancing).

So yeah, if someone can tell me if there is something like a collision lod var, it would be much appreciated
If not, suggestions on a workaround for our problem would be nice, too

cheers

how about creating dummy models just for collision which overlay LOD3
then remove all detection from the models?

That's an idea, but if we do that, there's a whole bunch of additional polygons which have to be rendered which means additional slowdown for the engine. Also, decals wouldn't work this way. Not having decals wouldn't be thaaat bad however if it significantly speeds up the fps.

Any other ideas?

Why cant you use decals? If you would use a LOD stage as collision box all collision information have to be interpreted by you in the scope of the collision mesh which can be way different than the original one.

Using a lowpoly mesh as collision mesh is a good idea and I am also voting for using a LOD stage if available. In connection with the MED LOD-Tool this could be a really powerful, new feature.

For now I guess you have to pay that entity overhead for LOD'ed collision detection if you would use the dummy approach. I think, the payoff will be suprisingly good compared to no dummy models and the full mesh as collision mesh