August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1008 pages
21h 13m
English
Eric Risser University of Central Florida
In this chapter we present the true impostors method, an efficient technique for adding a large number of simple models to any scene without rendering a large number of polygons. The technique utilizes modern shading hardware to perform ray casting into texture-defined volumes. With this method, multiple depth layers representing non-height-field surface data are associated with quads.
Like traditional impostors, the true impostors approach rotates the quad around its center so that it always faces the camera. Unlike the traditional impostors technique, which displays a static texture, the true impostors technique uses the pixel shader to ray-cast a view ray through the quad in ...