Foliage-Shadow-Imposter

Youtube Vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmJ_R4uT0-w&ab_channel=Wanli

Paper:

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/12784/127842E/Unreal-engine-nanite-foliage-shadow-imposter/10.1117/12.2692451.short#_=_

There was no good Nanite Shadow Imposter demonstration on the Internet while l wrote this paper.

So, l thought, why didn’t l make one?

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The idea is to increase performance by replacing dynamic shadow-casting foliage with shadow imposters and non-shadow casting foliage, disabling expensive World Position Offset shadow on selected foliage and replace it with a static shadow imposter of the current mesh.

• uncached virtual shadow map with dynamic shadow

• cached virtual shadow map with shadow imposter

DisplayMap2 is built with WPO foliage with dynamic shadow; DisplayMap3 is built with WPO foliage with static shadow imposter.
Try run through the forests, the density gets higher the further you go.
Simple weather change, time change, and Landscape replacement functions are also implemented(see below👇).

Have Fun!

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key mapping:

//movement
W, A, S, D: move

//swap maps
Z: Go to DisplaMap2(dynamic shadow map)
X: Go to DisplayMap3(shadow imposter map)

//scalability
C, V, B, N, M: set scalability, c being low(lowest), m being cinematic(highest)

//time change
R: change time, adding 6 hours in 1 second
T: change time, adding 6 hours in 20 second
Y: move forward by 30 mins
U: move backward by 30 mins

// landscape replacement
L: swap realistic Landscape with a simple one
K: swap simple Landscape with a realistic Landscape

// weather rotation
1, 2, 3, 4: change weather (clear skies, cloudy, rainy, snowy)

Esc: quit game