Avatar imposters; was: [sldev] visual muting

[Mike Monkowski]

I'm sorry.  I wasn't specifically asking about muting.  It's just that 
this thread reminded me of my reaction to the imposters in WindLight.  I 
should have renamed the subject.

I realize that the imposters used very few resources, but they look 
really bad and there doesn't seem to be any gradation.  A fully rendered 
avatar suddenly transforms into a coarsely pixellated billboard.  It 
would seem that a progression through lower LOD before jumping to 
billboards would be less disruptive.

Hmmm. Or do I see this because I'm using the alt-zoom camera and the 
transition to imposters is based on my avatar location, not the camera 
location?

Mike


Eric M. Tulla wrote:
> Mike Monkowski wrote:
> 
>> Dave Parks wrote:
>>
>>> I just finished visual muting for avatars using impostors (muting an 
>>> avatar strips them of attachments and renders them as a solid grey 
>>> silhouetted impostor that only updates every 16 frames).
>>
>>
>> Why avatar impostors instead of LOD?  It looks like LOD processing is 
>> already there and it's just a matter of tuning it.  Given the rather 
>> ugly appearance of imposters, there must be some advantage.
>>
>> Mike
>>
> Using impostors for visual muting allows you to display a muted avatar 
> using only 2 triangles (a billboard) with minimal pre-computation, while 
> still somewhat preserving form.  Using LOD would require greater 
> overhead for the actual muting and less of a performance gain, 
> especially if you want to preserve shape (even with a really low LOD 
> you'll still be drawing many, many more triangles per frame).
>