How’s the bug fixing going? 
Hi John,
I’m at the point of private beta testing of it - if you’re interested, email me at rd@recourse.nz and let me know which version of UE you’re using and I could send you a link to the beta version to get an idea of what’s in there…
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Ah, interesting! Well, how long will it stay in “private beta testing”? Is that version any different from the version that will be on the marketplace, or is it complete already?
Hopefully not long.
It has some major changes under the hood - all the different LOD types now use the GPU to harvest the meshes and of course the Impostor creation is in there, but it appears to be working from 4.25 up to 5.20. (still getting the 4.25 impostors to work though)
So far so good though.
If you’re using 4.25 or 4.26 you’ll need the ImpostorBaker plugin, I’ve just finished a tutorial on it:
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Nice! I plan to primarily use it on 4.27. If you benefit from more people beta testing it then I’m happy to do that, but if it’s something that doesn’t make much difference to you, then I’m happy to wait a few days until it’s out of beta.
I’m definitely interested in feedback, but if you’re happy to wait, let’s do that - I’m guessing I will be releasing an update fairly soon afterward with any fixes and improvements needed anyway.
I’d like to do a bit more documentation about it all to make it easier too…
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rdLODtools version 1.4 is now live.
This contains the Impostor LOD creation tools that creates Impostors for the ImpostorBaker system - replacing the whole creation side of the Impostors.
This has passed all my internal tests, but is still “experimental” - please let me know if there is anything not working correctly for you, or if you have any suggestions.
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Nice!
I have tried it out now, and so far I can’t get it to work correctly… I have tried to use the exact same settings that you use in the “Creating Imposters” tutorial on your website:
The result I get from that is this:
I guess the overall shape looks correct, but the color doesn’t. I’m testing this on a Quixel Megascans foliage mesh (Elderberry).
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Yeah, I get that same result when building it from the ImpostorBaker too - the megascans trees all seem to do it - I have it on my list to find what they’ve done to get it to work in their existing impostors - my guess is they’ve completely removed the depth map to stop it from trying to do the fake lighting.
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Testing with a different foliage pack from the marketplace, not using Megascans, I do get the exact same issue though:
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I have found something that could be the cause and I’m investigating it now…
Out of interest - if you show the UV for LOD0 - are there any red areas?
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Nice!
If I test with the default color calibration cube from Unreal Engine, it does look like this:
So here the color does not have the same issue like with the foliage, but it’s still broken, there is a weird distortion going on. And the color also is weirdly low-contrast.
No, there are no red areas in any of the UV channels of the mesh. That flower mesh has 3 UV channels, and they’re all not red:
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Ok thanks, I’ll look more into it.
Regarding the colors - Impostors are not perfect, here’s a snapshot of what ImpostorBaker creates on the same mesh:
Some of it depends on the format your using for your textures too.
And that shape is a little strange, I’ll look into it.
Thanks for the testing!
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Yeah I don’t expect the colors to be perfect, but on that screenshot you posted, they do look fine, they aren’t so low-contrast like in my screenshot.
Also, I have seen in your manual that “currently only Upper Hemisphere is supported”. For my main use case, I do very much need lower hemisphere support too, is that something you will soon add?
Yes try adjusting the “brightness” and “vibrance” values - I was able to get it looking pretty close by adjusting them. That also worked for the Megascans trees - moving the brightness down to about 0.4 had them look fairly close to the main LOD.
The calibration cube is going to have slightly darkened colors because the distance field creation in your version is going off the sides of each frame and darkening the other frames - I will fix that. (that’s also why it has that funny shape).
I’ve implimented the tickbox for raycasting and added one to turn off the distance fields - turning that off helps make the megascans trees look a little less “dense” too.
I’ll move the full sphere support up in the priorities now I know you’re wanting it.
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Yes try adjusting the “brightness” and “vibrance” values - I was able to get it looking pretty close by adjusting them. That also worked for the Megascans trees
I don’t quite understand, are you saying adjusting those values fixes the issue with the imposter looking black? Or is that a different issue that you fixed already locally, and you mean after I have that fix, I need to adjust those values too for the color to look ideal?
yes, without any changes - just adjusting the textures brightness from the texture editor brought the colors back into the MS tree I tested it on - The color in the texture itself seems to have all the information in there. There may be a fix, I’ll continue looking into it, but that at least brings the colors back for now…
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Ok, interesting! You did mention the vibrance, how can that actually be changed on the generated impostor textures? For me, the “vibrance” field is greyed out on those:
Oh, I can’t seem to get it to disable - what compression type are you using?
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