Hi, I was just wondering if anyone has used impostors for rendering distant nodes in an octree based rendering setup, and if so, is it much of a ball ache to setup, and are the speed increases worthwhile?

soconne I have a question...


Did you have trouble with any edge artifacts while rendering? I have always been interested in implementing a node-imposter scheme but assumed it would be hard to make the edges play nicely with each other. Could you elaborate on what you mean by rendering to the zbuffer? Surely if you render the actual node mesh to the zbuffer it would undermind the imposter strategy. Thanks.

This greatly depends on what your nodes contain. If they contain trees, bushes and grass then impostors can give you very good results because the details aren't animated a lot, and they're typical so high frequncy that you'll not notice things like aliasing.
You could have *some* of the contents in an imposter (depth sprites!), such as all the bushes and trees in an impostor, but render the terrain normally - hopefully there won't be much trees and stuff near the edges.


If your nodes contains a bunch of animated monsters then it may be a whole lot more difficult.