Hello gamedev, I am currently evaluating the worthiness of jumping into RD work for an automatic impostor system in our engine. In the past I've witnessed tremendous performance increase from such a system into the engine of LumenRT (which has to cope with unoptimized user created content). We're a little bit in the same situation right now. Possibly large fields with way too much data (high poly etc..).
So if the engine would support auto-impostor-ing of stuff that'd be cool. Though, to make it a bit more modern, I was thinking that we could extend the parallax validity of billboards by storing the depth too, and render them using parallax occlusion mapping.
So the invalidation could come after the camera has moved to a more radical angle than for traditional impostors. These exist techniques with full volumetric billboards that I am aware of, but they need the gometry shader to generate slices, and cost heavy voxel storage. I need something very light on the bandwidth to cope with switch/PS4 limitations.
Can you point me to modern research on well balanced imposter techniques sounding like this ? or any idea you have on the matter.
thanks