Horde3D

In my current project, my artists have started to become very ambitious with the level geometry. It is clear to me that the manual optimizations that are possible with the engine will no longer suffice. I was thinking of a flight sim where the player flies over mountaintops obscured by clouds, they're thinking massive canyons and caverns, which can tons more fun than my idea.

So I was thinking of ways to automate the optimization process, and one thing I thought of was to actually build it into the collada converter. When writing out the mesh nodes for a model, it could be possible to apply an optimization technique to the mesh such as a Quad or Octree instead of breaking the mesh up soley by materials as it currently does. However, after looking at the code I am still rather confused as to where I would drop an algorithm. Not to mention my knowledge of algorithms in this field are not my strong point (and quite frankly, never have been )

Has anyone else explored this possibility and can offer some advice?