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  • LOD Workflow (3D) - Blender plugin to bake imposters

This is not my tool, but rather I have just found a plugin for Blender that looks to dramatically speed up any LOD Imposter workflow. I didn't see anything in the forum about it so wanted to let you all know .

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4P9Bifze8QY

Till now I had been basically doing what this plugin does manually in Blender which is more than a little time-consuming. This just does it in seconds. Should dramatically speed up making plane based imposters for LQ LOD, while for MQ I will possibly still stick to a decimated mesh as I can't replicate the shader sorcery in this video (if anyone else can/does please let me know :D ).

This + Sapling Tree Gen = Peak!

4 months later

This is really nice! Can you define what you mean by LQ and MQ?

If I had to guess, it probably stands for Low Quality (LQ) and Medium Quality (MQ).

Indeed MQ refers to Medium Quality, though the more I played around with imposters I decided there wasn't that much point in this middle ground as it causes 2 sets of transitions instead of 1, more assets to load etc. It was more of a headache than it needed to be.

In a bright scene my preference is to go with LOD0/1 (LQ/HQ) then apply alpha dithering to both meshes in opposing directions at your specified LOD distance (so it's not a on/off transtion but more of a 'phasing' effect). This does cause odd behaviour on the screen edges for distant objects though where I think the FoV of the camera comes into play (due to the raycast going to the cameras origin regardless of angle).

Anyway I have since found a new plugin that does it in engine and does a better job (actually produces omnidirectional imposters :D) : https://github.com/wojtekpil/Godot-Octahedral-Impostors

Again this is also not my plugin and comes with its own quirks, but so far in my testing, it's been great.