Hello everyone!
Happy to announce Amplify Impostors, a 1-click solution that allows you to optimize your projects with ease by using next-generation Billboard Impostors. In this first BETA release, we set out to gather your input as we did in the past with the award-winning Amplify Shader Editor.
Our goal is to provide a flexible, community driven, all-in-one impostor creation solution that adapts to any type of project. As always, you can count on us for fast iteration rates and premium support. Not all planned features are currently included, and as with our shader editor, we’ll continue to improve it based on the community response - we look forward to having you on board!
We can’t wait to see what you create by taking advantage of custom impostor shaders!
What exactly are Impostors?
Impostors are camera facing quads, or simple polygonal shapes, that replace complex geometry at a distance by rendering a fake 3D representation of the original asset that can either be baked in-editor or created at runtime. Our tool currently only provides the in-editor baked variant, realtime generation will be added soon.
They are flexible.
Amplify impostors, pre-baked or runtime, can be moved, rotated, scaled, receive and cast shadows, and even intersect with other objects or impostors. Impostors can be used directly with Unity’s LOD Group, third-party LOD systems, or by themselves - you can quickly adapt them to your pipeline, be it with existing or new projects.
A modern approach.
Making full use of GPU-based instancing, our tool provides Spherical and Octahedron Impostor techniques, the latter being capable of performing smart transitions between different views. It’s important to note that impostors are not meant to be used as a 1-1 replacement of your standard geometry, each technique has its own pros and cons that you should consider before using it; typical workflows involve displaying the actual mesh at close range and the impostor from a certain distance.
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Why should you use them?
Instant optimization! Be it for mobile devices, less performant consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, or fully loaded desktops - it’s a 1-click solution that will drastically reduce your Polygon and Draw Call count.
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Features
- 1-Click Bake!
- Octahedron and Spherical Impostors
- Billboard Shape Editor
- Smart Blending between views
- Hardware Instancing
- Depth-write for Object Intersections
- Forward and Deferred rendering
- Full Lighting and Shadowing
- Dithered LOD Cross-Fade
- LODGroup compatible
Upcoming Features
- Dynamic Impostors
- Custom Material Baking
- Batch Processing
- Custom shaders via Amplify Shader Editor
- Lightweight and HD Scriptable Render Pipeline support
Technical Considerations
Currently only shaders exposing a Deferred path are supported for baking, such as Unity Standard shaders. However, the Impostors created can be used in both Forward and Deferred modes.
Known Issues
- Being a BETA release, there’s a couple of issues that we want to iron out in the upcoming weeks. Until then we hope to improve it even further with the help of those that join us during this period. Below are some of the critical issues we are working at the moment.
- Changing texture size in the Impostor component “freezes” momentarily due to background calculations.
- Impostor becomes invisible when viewed directly from below.
- Slow bake/save times.
Do you have a project you think would be great test case for impostors? Get in touch at info@amplify.pt, we would love to hear from you!
Amplify Impostors is currently in BETA, available exclusively at the Asset Store: Amplify Impostors
