True Imposters

Eric Risser

True Imposters takes advantage of the latest graphics hardware to achieve accurate geometric representation updated every frame for any arbitrary viewing angle. It builds off of Relief Mapping of Non-Height Field Surfaces [Policarpo 2006] and continues past the goals of traditional per-pixel displacement mapping techniques which are to add visually accurate sub-surface features to any arbitrary surface by generating whole 3D objects on a billboard. True Imposters distinguishes itself from previous per-pixel displacement mapped imposter methods by offering no viewing restrictions, animation and performance optimizations.

Images

Microsoft DirectX 9 and HLSL were used to implement True Imposters on a GeForce 6800 AGP graphics card.

Here we see six different orientations of our dog imposter, each using only one quad (two polygons) and one main height map texture, two normal maps and a single texture for color information.

The previous five images show Jupiter's ring being rendered with 150,000 individual fully three dimensional asteroids with per pixel level of detail. The above images run 30-40 fps on a Geforce 7800 GT.

Video

Jupiter

Publications:

Eric A. Risser

Paper:

Poster: