Embodiments use hierarchical continuous level of detail (H-CLOD) trees with inherited splitting plane partitioning to reduce visual artifacts in renderings. For example, a three-dimensional mesh can be iteratively split, according to iteratively defined splitting planes, until sub-meshes are smaller than a predetermined bucket size. Each splitting can define a hierarchical level of a tree, so that the original mesh is a root node, each split sub-mesh is a child node, and the smallest meshes are leaf nodes. An H-CLOD tree can be generated by simplifying and combining each group of sibling node sub-meshes bottom-up into a simplified parent mesh accounting for inherited splitting planes, so that the tree has a most simplified mesh as its root node and a most un-simplified mesh formed by a combination of its leaf nodes. At render time, traversing the H-CLOD tree can produce a desired level of detail from the pre-computed nodes.
