The Visual Engine | Amplify Impostors Module
The Visual Engine is a set of high-quality shaders and tools designed to unify 3rd party assets under the same shader system. Enable high-quality wind motion, interaction, seasons, wetness, subsurface, layers, variation, etc. for all assets with Standard, Universal, or HD Render Pipeline!
Amplify Impostors is a modern and flexible impostors authoring tool used to bake high-density geometry to quads while keeping the original shading! Impostors can be moved, rotated, scaled, receive and cast shadows, intersect other objects or impostors, and can be used with LODGroup or any LOD system.
○ Overview
Combine the power of the award-winning shading and unification tools provided by the Visual Engine with the power of the optimized impostors provided by Amplify Impostors! The Amplify Impostors Module includes presets and runtime shaders for perfect baking with Standard, Universal, and HD pipelines, while the seasons, overlay, wetness, wind, and interaction remain dynamic!
○ Compatibility
The Amplify Impostors Module supports the following Render Pipelines:
✓ Standard Render Pipeline 2021.3+
✓ Universal Render Pipeline 2021.3+ / 2022.3+ / 6000.0+
✓ HD Render Pipeline 2021.3+ / 2022.3+ / 6000.0+
The Amplify Impostors Module has integration with the following 3rd party tools:
✓ Amplify Shader Editor - Full shader editing support
✓ Nature Renderer - Procedural Instancing support
✓ Vegetation Studio - Instanced Indirect support
✓ Vegetation Studio Pro - Instanced Indirect support
✓ GPU Instancer - Instanced Indirect support
The Amplify Impostors Module supports the following modules:
✓ The Visual Engine • Terrain Elements Module
○ Features
✓ The Visual Engine systems support: All systems
✓ The Visual Engine elements support: All elements
✓ Realistic Transmission support in Standard RP and URP
✓ Diffusion Profiles Transmission support in HDR
✓ All light types are now supported for Transmission
✓ Deferred and Subsurface shader types support
✓ Amplify Shader Editor support
✓ Basic demo scene included
○ Limitations
🞫 Shader Model 4.5+ capable devices are required (Desktop / High-End Mobile)
🞫 Oculus Quest and other Mobile-based VR devices are not supported
🞫 HDRP with TAA causes blurry results with impostors
🞫 Lightmap baking with impostors is not supported and is out of scope!
○ Disclaimers
⚑ Due to their nature, impostors are designed to be used as distance LODs. While the baking will match the original shader settings, the lighting will not match perfectly, but it will be quite close to the original!
