Questions about Imposter Plugin

[wickerman123]

Hi all,

Just trying out @RyanB 's impostor plugin: http://www.shaderbits.com/blog/octahedral-impostors

I’m a little lost when it comes to the material setup. I can see in the description that if I want to include other maps like Subsurface, I need to add that to the material myself. Seen as the output is a material instance it’s a little confusing: do I modify the parent or do I modify the material function that is the base of the parent?

My results aren’t quite as good as the example given on Ryan’s blog and I’m assuming that’s due to lack of Subsurface scattering. The impostor on the left of the first image is the exported static mesh with the generated material instance applied to it.

In the attached images, you can see that the colour isn’t quite right and looking at the impostor with the sun behind it washes it out and causes weird highlights on the trunk.

I’m assuming there’s a step I’m missing or a setting I’ve not configured properly?

Any help would be appreciated.

[wickerman123]

@RyanB

Did you include the required material function in all your materials? It looks as it it was not captured with the ImpostorCaptureSwitch present. Check the debug visualization buffers and render targets.

And yes, you need to hook up SSS or other textures in the parent material and possibly extend the function outputs. I will make an upgraded version soon that has it.

Thanks for the quick response @RyanB !

I did miss one of the materials. Looks a lot better now but still getting weird results. Same setup as before but now the generated material instance looks worse that the dynamic instance displayed in the blueprint.

I edited the “imposter_ThreeFrameBlend” function and replaced the default Subsurf colour with a texture input - not sure if this is correct.