how to make foliage impostors that don’t stick out like a sore thumb

The problem

foliage impostors often don’t look that great - and need to be swapped out of sight as soon as possible - this lowers performance in games overall. the main problem being that they are just mesh cards that don’t react to lighting accurately, so they stand out from everything else

The solution

• A modified version of the houdini impostor baker, which includes a SDF volume
• import to unreal, and use the volume for accurate lighting

(this seemed somewhat unintuitive - and matching the volume with what’s basically a mesh card with a flipbook involved some annoying math - but if it works, it works)

todo: add the annoying math here later

The end result

• being able to swap the impostors way closer without noticing any difference = better performance
• easy to make them basically visually indistinguishable from the 3d mesh