ShapeScape uses the same shader-impostor approach for point-based leaves, keeping foliage fast at scale. #tradigital #shader #blender #geometrynodes #folliage

This is interesting! Thanks for sharing. Do you think this can be implemented in large open world games with minimal performance impact compared to state of the art features such as mesh shaders?

It already is used in a lot of games, hard to say if it is going to affect performance much. Really depends on the system you are using it on I suppose. Look up point sprites! That’s where this idea came from.

So the point still has geometry? We typically use instanced leaf/branch meshes which are a lot faster to render.

A single point alone is still far more performant than an instance. Points have no geometry, they are just a single vertex that can be scaled up. These “point spheres” work extremely well under heavy loads since their “form” is almost baked in and can never change.

I assume point spheres are a blender thing?

Yes! Sorry, should have mentioned that. I believe rendered points was added back in 3.0 sometime. It’s mainly used for simulations but this is a fun usecase as well!

I think SimCity 2013 used a similar approach for tree rendering

This is absolutely diabolical 😂

This is cool!

Umm this has been around for almost 20 + years .. that’s how we used to 2D-3D stereo, DMP, projections etc. and still in projection.

Buddy, explain Spider-Man 2's interiors.

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