How extensive is the impostor terrain generation?

[Bezoro]

For example, does the impostor terrain contain objects on it (Trees, buildings and other large props), decimated and merged with the terrain, with a single material for maximum performance (Similar to how UE does it)? Or is it essentially just the base terrain with textures and I'd need to do the rest manually?

From what I could tell from the documentation there is an option to copy the gameobjects to the impostor terrain, but they don't get decimated or anything, so I'd need to export it all to a DCC and do it myself.

[Bryan]

That is correct It can move objects over and turn off the original ones. It will do textures and tree data based on the terrain data that is on the normal Unity terrain. 

[Bezoro]

Can the terrain and the game objects be exported together in an fbx so they can be edited in a DCC? Say if you have a village (made up of many game objects) on a terrain you could export both the impostor terrain and the village as one fbx to be decimated and merged then reimported back into unity.

 

I guess the fastest workflow in my case would be to use Gaia to create the impostor terrain, Mesh Baker to merge multiple objects together (like the village example) then PolyFew to decimate the resulting merged mesh then finally Mesh Baker again to merge it with the impostor terrain. That way I should be able to do everything in Unity with the least amount of friction and time.

 

If you guys could improve on the current system it would be pretty amazing. I don't think any asset store tool right now can automate this whole process.

I believe in UE they voxelize the terrain and all objects on it then generate a very low resolution mesh, texture and very simple material from that. That would cut down from hours, or even days of work depending on the complexity of the objects on the terrain, to minutes.

[Bryan]

Yeah that would be interesting.