Imposters not working for most of m,y assets

[sebastianrueckerai]

This addon is a god-sent when it works!!!

Unfortunately for most of my assets (trees, bushes) it does not work. It runs, I even see good looking preview images after hitting "generate", but the resulting imposters are empty.

I am more than happy to help and debug this issue and even help fix it if I can. Here is a minimal sample project I made: https://github.com/sebastianrueckerai/GodotImposters

I have a bush which I would like to tun into an imposter. The preview images look good, but the resulting imposter is invisible.

[zhangjt93]

Would it be possible to share a video? I tried using your project to bake the bush - even though the precision was low, it didn't look empty at all!

[sebastianrueckerai]

Ah, damn! Thanks... Doing it again, now it works. Perhaps I did something wrong creating the imposter in the example project.

However: The process still fails for most of my assets. I am including a video of one failing: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zy41dganmkyei0o639zmf/2024-10-25-20-30-31-Imposter.mkv?rlkey=hzplc601jry6selglyblb4joc&dl=0

Here is the created imposter along with the created textures. For some reason the texture seems mostly transparent. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8jx2sfargtb0tca6ce6fs/ImposterOakBug.zip?rlkey=8yry8qyh6ukr7werpptlzjz2y&dl=0

I noticed this message: res://addons/Imposter/imposter/scripts/photostudio.gd:249 - Invalid access to property or key 'subsurf_scatter_enabled' on a base object of type 'ShaderMaterial'.

We can also jump on a discord call to investigate further, if that's an option!

[zhangjt93]

Does your model have custom ShaderMaterial for animation?

For imposters, we need to bake the model from different angles. If the object is animated, image baking won't work.

Also, imposters are mainly used to optimize distant objects, so animation might not be necessary in most cases. Of course, the plugin should ideally handle this requirement, but unfortunately, I haven't implemented that feature yet. Just a heads up - for baking to work, the object's material needs to extend from BaseMaterial3D.

[sebastianrueckerai]

Thank you for your answer! I am pretty sure that is the problem. The trees I want to turn into imposters all have wind movement in the shaders.

One of the applications I had in mind for imposters are fields of vegetation. Like a field of grass or lavender. In many RPGs like Skyrim the distant terrain changes visibly when the distance foliage pops out. You then see the ground texture and were it does not match the foliage color the change is often jarring.

I currently do vegetation like this with Scatter: https://github.com/HungryProton/scatter Now currently I cant even try to bake a scatter node as an imposter. Is there an chance to make this work? I have experience developing in Godot, just not with developing addons. If I can, I would be happy to help!