Amplify Impostors - Next Generation Billboards

is it possible that impostor is causing deselection on play?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/selection-is-deselected-upon-pressing-play.787886/#post-5271459

 

Thanks for the heads-up!

 

Greetings.

I am using URP and Unity 2019.3.0f1. I've noticed your shader doesn't work with with gradient environment lighting. Here is a screen comparing skybox lighting with gradient lighting:

 

Are you using the latest version? We will have to run a few tests when we return, apologies for the inconvenience.

 

Greetings everyone!

It's that time of the year where we all take some time off to be with our loved ones and recharge our batteries. We're usually around, more or less, but this year we've decided to officially shutdown until the 2nd of January. We apologize for any inconvenience caused but rest assured that we will be back on the 3rd at full force.

Please submit support requests directly to support@amplify.pt so that we can go through them when we return, we wont be able to monitor the Discord channel and official Unity Forum threads during December.

Happy holidays!

 

See you next year and thanks again for this solid release.

 

I am using v0.9.6 rev003

 

Impostors are not selectable in the scene view. Any way that you can make them selectable?

 

Hello! I am trying to make an Oculus Quest (VR) flight sim and want full forests. I am using Amplify Imposters for my trees but can't get them to work in a way I am happy with. I have meshes of several hundred trees that I have several LOD levels, finally with an Imposter as the final LOD. In Unity they are amazing - reduce 300,000 triangles to 30,000, and they look great. However when I am in VR they load strange - they look out of shape, sink into the ground if I have any height. I have tried circular, hemi, oct and hemi, none seem to get the desired result. Do you have any ideas? Do they work in VR? Thanks very much - I really hope I can get these working in the editor they are amazing!

Edit: It might be an issue with large meshes - still trying to figure it out.
Edit2: Large meshes don't seem to work. Also, all small and large imposters sink into the terrain, or into the mesh they are on, when the camera (player) goes above them, like flying over them in the flight sim.
Edit3: They seem to be very unmanageable for mobile - any chance on a mobile shader?

 

How do I work this with LWRP?

 

That's odd, I just tested it and it seems to be working. Does updating the lighting have no effect at all? Please confirm that you are using the later URP version available.

They are but Unity is a bit finicky, not sure if there's anything we can do to improve it at this time.

You could be hitting one of the limitations of this technique, we could really use some additional details in order to best debug the problem. We would appreciate a few screenshots with your rendering distance, sinking impostors, and other related issues.

AI works with larger meshes, it will ultimately depend on the actual mesh, bake parameters, and render distance.

You can disable unwanted channels for mobile impostors, we currently do not provide additional shaders other than what you can create with ASE for custom baking/runtime requirements.

The same way as it does with the built-in renderer, you simply need to import the required SRP package and make sure that your impostor is baked using the correct preset.

 

Rectangle selection works, not click selection. They're not back facing though...

 

On which Unity version? I did test it yesterday, it worked with click selection but it is finicky.

 

Imposters is not working for some reason. I Just get pink. 2019.3.0f1 (Can't change this.. studio-wide lockdown) URP in a brand new project. Ideas?

 

Hey there!

I recommend updating your package, if you have not already. Try re-importing the URP package located under "AmplifyImpostors\Plugins\EditorResources\RenderPipelinePackages", and be sure that you are using the latest URP.

Does our URP sample render correctly?

Let us know if it helps.

 

2019.3f3
So when you said finicky I tried and tried and tried clicking everywhere, it never click selects so it's 100% repro (good news)

 

it is magic , extremely useful for trees , good job , i bought it

 

i can bake texture , reduce polygon , but tree polygons is my headache , you solve my problem , i can make large exterior scene now

 

It's reproducible but, as I mentioned, not sure there's anything we can currently do given the way Unity is handling selections; it simply ignores vertices transforms as it stands so you'll have to manage to click the actual quad, which remains static without billboarding, to select it in the scene view.

Not ideal so we will definitely keep an eye out for possible workarounds.

Awesome, happy to hear it was useful!

 

so if i understand impostor shader changes the geometry and unity can't detect selection with those new vertex positions. i tried clicking in the center which should work but didn't. is it because the shader is also orienting the quad to the camera and in this case it's fading away?

 

No, the quad is not billboarded. Can you send me a shot of the Impostors? (wireframe selection visible)

 

Thanks!

Not sure what could be happening there, we would have to try it out but, sadly, there's really not much we can do at the moment.

 

here is the prefab https://www.dropbox.com/s/p3n1gi280zaybvx/impostor.unitypackage?dl=0

 

Not sure what could be happening on your side but, as I mentioned, this can be a problem and there's not much we can do at the moment. I noticed that some of the included Impostor files were different from our latest version, be sure to update if you have not already.

 

Yours looks perfect as click selection works
mine, click selection doesn't work at all
see this new 2019.3f5 project, one cube impostorized, with the latest Version0.9.6.003

 

Mixed results for me, I can select the cube but not a barrel impostor in the last test; drag-select did work as an alternative. Best to wait for any possible improvements at this stage, apologies for the inconvenience.

 

Hello Ricardo, let me first say this tool looks really promising and is quite impressive.
We have however a question regarding functionality, will there ever be the possibility to use these impostors with a limited angle of view? We'd love to be able to use Amplify Impostors for background elements as that would give us a whole lot of freedom, but in our case, rendering the billboards from all angles just ends up wasting a whole lot of texture space. So I was hoping you could say there will be a way to use these impostors with a setting allowing to define how far from forward-facing the bake (and shader) view angle can be... Or if there was an easy enough set of changes we could make to achieve that result?

 

Hello,

Thanks for checking it out!

Amplify Impostors is currently meant to be used specifically for baking multiple views of your assets. We do provide HemiOctahedron impostors, but not regular billboards. I would recommend using the spherical type with the lowest number of views possible for now.

We do plan to improve how bakes are controlled but I don't have any official details at the moment. We're still in beta, so definitely stick around for incoming updates as we still have a lot planned for this solution.

Thanks!

 

Hi guys,

I recently purchased Amplify Impostors and it looks really promising, but I'm unable to bake Albeda RGB colors. I get plain black while Alpha is OK.

I'm using Unity 2019.30f5 + URP 7.1.7 and a custom ShaderGraph Unlit shader.








I tried using the defaut URP Lit shader and it works quite well.






What am I doing wrong?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

I have a question regarding the specular values circled red in this screenshot. I generated this octahedron imposter and noticed it has a strong highlight when back lit by a directional light, which breaks the illusion between LODs. I've tried adjusting the spec/smoothness and shadow view value.... though I can't tone down this highlight. I'm using the built-in pipeline/2018.3.8 Any suggestions?

 

Hello, thank you for your support!

I suspect that the shader used(Toon Free) does not expose a Deferred Path,such as Standard Unity Shaders, which is currently a requirement for baking. The Impostors created can be used in both Forward and Deferred modes. If the original mesh has a custom forward-only shader like many assets from the asset store do, you'll need to bake it using a custom baking shader.

Is the toon shader from a Unity sample? We would be happy to confirm it on our side.

I can't quite tell from the screenshot as octahedron impostors breakdown at closer distances, would it be possible to test or see a higher resolution impostor and a comparison with the spherical variant? Would be great if we could examine it just to be sure it's working as expected.

Thanks!

 

@Amplify_Ricardo Thanks for the quick reply.

The shader I use is a custom ShaderGraph network I created from scratch.
Any chance you have a tutorial about creating the baking shader with ShaderGraph?

 

I am using Universal RP v7.1.6

Some comparisons between "Amplify Impostors/Octahedron Impostor URP" (left ones) and "Universal Renderer Pipeline/Simple Lit" (right ones):


As you can see impostor completly ignores my Environment Lighting settings.

 

The process should be similar but you'll still need Amplify Shader Editor if you need to create a runtime Impostor shader; do you have access to ASE?

From our tests it seems to be working. I recommend upgrading to the latest Unity 2019.3 version and using the latest URP package(7.1.7). Are you constrained to that specific Unity version?

Thanks!

 

We’re really excited about Imposters as they’re helping solve our tree rendering problem (City Builder game).
We’re currently rendering our trees using Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced and handling LOD’ing and a variety of other things in there.

Tried dropping in our generated imposters as our LOD 2/3’s to reduce our Tri draw count but we’re getting some strange artifacting and was wondering if this had been encountered and whether using DrawMeshInstanced is a supported use case?

 

After upgrading URP to 7.1.7 it still doesn't work properly with gradient lighting.

 

Hello,

We could really use some additional details regarding your project. Which rendering system are you currently using?

A sample would be ideal, this would speedup the debug process on our side. It could be related to HDRP bakes using multi-materials with different surface types but we can't know for sure without further testing/information.

I think we need to dig deeper into this one. Please send us a full project with just that prefab and Amplify Impostors using the latest URP, with a comparison side by side between the model and impostor.

Please use WeTransfer or a similar service to send it directly to support@amplify.pt.

Thanks!

 

Hi sorry, wrote at the end of a long day and forgot the additional details.

We're in Unity 2019.3.0f5 and using HDRP 7.1.7
The Trees are all 1 Mesh 1 Material (The Material itself uses a shader created in Shader Editor).
As for the rendering, we are calling where the first parameter is the relevant Mesh (Switching between LOD levels), second is Submesh 0 (as we always only have 1 Submesh), the relevant Material to LOD level (this really only matters when using the Imposter as the others use the same texture), the Matrix array of our trees including rotations

Code (CSharp):

1.  Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced(relevantLODMesh, 0, relevantLODMaterial, matrixArray, numberOfMatricesToRender, nullMaterialPropertyBlock, UnityEngine.Rendering.ShadowCastingMode.Off, false);

I've uploaded our tree assets (with our Imposters). If you need any info, just let me know.
https://we.tl/t-4ApAFzCey4

 

Thank you for the sample, we really appreciate it.

Unfortunately, the AI developer has to be away for 2 weeks; support will return to normal as soon as possible.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

 

Do you know of any reason that the leaves on trees would not be displayed? When I bake a speedtree, it only draws the trunk.

 

same here

 

Which shader do you use for the leaves?
What's the current renderer and Unity version?

Thanks!

 

In HDRP, having an HDRP impostor visible in a planar reflection probe causes NaN's to propagate. (Here I have Stop NaN Propagation enabled on the camera to see anything, usually the screen just turns black.)


I've tried both Spherical, and the Hemi Octahedron modes. I'm guessing the flipped camera matrix causes a divide by zero or similar.
Here's a video of the problem as well: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/563793061939904512/672676623014821888/j1IiDSsX9P.mp4

 

Made a few tests and it seems to be working as expect. As I mentioned in your Discord Sample, we need to know the exact versions used, a sample would help us debug any possible, issues.

Thanks!

 

Possible to try a demo before purchasing?

 

get outta here, just buy it, it's excellent

 

Hey there!

Not at the moment but be sure to reach out to support@amplify.pt if you have model you would like to test.

 

Hi, I purchased Amplify Impostors quite a while ago now (and it's been great), but I was wondering what the timeline was for SDF alphas? I know it's on the roadmap, but I'd love to get my hands on it as soon as I can so I figured I'd ask.

 

I've figured out this is not working properly when Emission & Occlusion texture in material is set to null. It's weird, because default texture is set to black, and it works properly when I attach black texture to it manually.