Multiple objects don't seem to show up

[SlashScreen]

It seems that multiple objects here don't seem to appear correctly in the renderer. Only the leaves appear, but not the trunk. If I select the trunk explicitly, it renders the trunk, but not the leaves.

Side note: Is the camera rendering orthographically a necessary part of the process?

[zhangjt93]

According to the organizational structure of the node tree you provided, I conducted a test and it seems that both child nodes are rendering correctly. Would it be possible for you to provide a test scene to my email: zzjjtt93@hotmail.com?

Please note that camera rendering orthographically is not a necessary part of this process. I just found it to be effective during my development process, and you can try it out. Also, make sure to modify the init_bake_scene() method in the photostudio.gd script located at res://addons/Imposter/imposter/scripts/. Specifically, look for the parameter settings related to bake_camera, which should be around lines 168-171.

[SlashScreen]

Sent.

[zhangjt93]

After my investigation, I believe that the issue is caused by the subsurface scattering effect applied to the material of the tree leaf model's node, which affects the rendering of other opaque objects.

Currently, I haven't come up with a suitable method to handle this issue in the code. A temporary solution would be to temporarily disable the subsurface scattering effect by calling RenderingServer.sub_surface_scattering_set_quality() during plugin initialization. However, this will affect the visual representation of objects in the editor, so I need to consider a suitable place to restore this setting.

Thank you for reporting this issue. I will continue to think about how to address this problem. In the meantime, I suggest temporarily disabling the subsurface scattering effect when working with such models.

[zhangjt93]

Maybe I have a good idea. I can check all the materials when setting up the baking node. If the subsurface scattering effect is enabled, I can replace it with an identical material that has the subsurface scattering effect disabled. It seems like a good solution to the issue.

[SlashScreen]

Perhaps you can also bake subsurface in, because the effect when subsurface is on and then turned off suddenly is rather dramatic. If you can turn it off, and read other outputs of things like ORM, perhaps you can also bake the subsurface channel. It won't be exactly correct, but it will be a good enough approximation. Or, perhaps, make an identical material with only the subsurface effect on, and have the subsurface color be something distinct, so that the subsurface effect is captured as the viewer would see it.

[zhangjt93]

Thanks for your suggestion. In order to address issue as quickly as possible, I have made this temporary solution. I will continue to optimize it further until I find a suitable resolution.

[SlashScreen]

Also:

• Is capturing self-shadowing possible? It seems like it shouldn't be, but I don't actually know what a shadow mesh does or what it's capable of. I noticed it didn't capture the shadows on the leaves cast by other leaves. I just need to know if I should design trees in the future in a way such to avoid this problem.
• As a use case of the impostors is is LOD, I have been using it as such. I noticed that when trying to make it fade in and out as the LOD level transition, it sort of just, pops in. This isn't the biggest issue, I can work around it, but I was wondering if the way it works internally is incompatible with however godot does the fade - I think using transparency, since it sometimes has depth problems in transition zones. I would rather it use dither, but I don't know how to make it do that.

[SlashScreen]

Relevant issue: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/5240

[zhangjt93]

Actually, shadows are created by sampling and distorting the rendering frame of the albedo texture, and then rendering it onto another quadmesh.

Maybe you could try adjusting the "dither" and "alpha_clamp" parameters in the generated QuadMesh material.