I think the biggest question users usually have is “what exactly are impostors?” Impostors are camera facing quads, or simple polygonal shapes, that replace complex geometry at a distance by rendering a fake 3D representation of the original asset that can either be baked in-editor or created at runtime. The great thing about this type of optimization is that it can be done entirely in-editor without needing to crunch your assets beforehand. You could conceivably bring in even higher-poly geometry specifically for Impostor creation (large forests and buildings). Additionally, we’re also going to provide a dynamic Impostors that will enable runtime baking in cases where we’re dealing with animated objects, such as crowds or foliage.

Traditional LOD assets are great but there was a need for a more flexible and immediate solution fit for specific cases, and that didn’t require any drastic pipeline changes. Once created, our impostors work great by themselves, with Unity LOD Groups, or with any other third-party LOD system as you would expect with any other asset. For users not familiar with Unity, this means that you have full control of how and when impostors are displayed, the type of transition between the impostor asset and the actual model, and how it should scale depending on the hardware.