Yes, it really depends on the workflow. A simple example would be a client asking for a forest with 15 unique bushes, 15 unique rocks, and 15 unique trees. You could download those assets from Poly Haven and place them directly into the scene, but then you run into three common problems: the assets can take a long time to render, you may not have time to manually reduce every model, and you may not want to lose detail through poly reduction.
That is exactly where my add-on fits. You select the assets and click “Generate Imposter Cards.”
It converts those objects into single-plane imposter cards in one pass. If “Dynamic” is enabled, the LOD switching from high-poly asset to imposter card is automatic, and all objects can share one material with one consolidated texture atlas.
Yes, atlases and trim sheets are another strong optimization strategy for games and rendering. This is a different but related workflow. In practice, artists often use downloaded assets with several large texture maps: diffuse, normal, roughness, alpha, metallic, AO, and so on. Poly Haven assets are a good example. Even 20 high-quality assets can become heavy very quickly.
My add-on makes those assets more efficient by creating a kind of “hologram” of the original object. This general idea exists under the hood in tools like Maya and in large film pipelines as well. Imagine a forest with 100,000 leaves and 50 leaf types. Instead of carrying all that geometry and all those separate draw calls, the add-on can turn those elements into card-based representations using shared atlas data.
Yes, tri-planar mode is related to that idea. In the image you showed, though, it looks like one face using incoming and object vectors to create pseudo-3D intersections in the shader. That is efficient because it avoids filling the scene with many physical intersecting planes.
Tri-Planar mode in my add-on uses three planes with true displacement. This improves ray-traced reflections, shadows, and intersections with nearby geometry. You can see the difference between the modes on the product page here:
The main reason Tri-Planar exists is for cases where users want imposters that provide better shadows, reflections, and object intersections than a single card can provide.
The simplest way to think about it is this: if an object is 5 meters away and does not need full geometry and full texture overhead, it can often become an imposter instead.
In the drawer example, the point is to show that users can edit the shader depth. Those drawers are only a single face in the GIF. Other objects in the scene could also be converted and packed into the same general workflow.
When you mention shared textures across materials, that is absolutely useful, but it is a different workflow. A lot of modern downloaded assets are not built that way. For example, a Poly Haven drawer asset may come with its own bespoke diffuse, normal, metallic, and roughness textures. This add-on helps when artists are already dealing with those kinds of heavy individual assets.
Yes, and it can save a lot of render time in both real-time workflows and final renders. In the right scene, a small LOD change can turn hours into minutes, or minutes into seconds.
Yes, if you choose dynamic switching, you are holding some extra data. That is true. But you also have the option to use the imposter cards without keeping the original objects in the scene.
A good example would be something like the huge trash environments in WALL-E.
If you know the camera will never get close to those objects, there is no reason to keep all the high-poly models loaded. You can convert them, store the imposters, and append only the imposter versions into the final scene. That removes the original geometry and texture overhead for large fields of background objects.
An artist with an asset library could convert those assets once and reuse the imposter versions in future projects. That means faster renders, lower memory use, a snappier viewport, and more visible objects on screen.
A sci-fi example would be spaceship greebles. You could build wildly complex pieces, convert them to imposters, and cover large ships with them while keeping render time, memory use, and scene update costs much lower.
Tthis is the kind of workflow larger tools and pipelines already benefit from. My goal is to bring a version of that workflow directly into Blender. If you use Poly Haven or other pre-made asset libraries to build scenes, this is probably closer to your use case than it might seem at first.
If you would like I can send you a copy of the addon, I would love to get mroe feedback.
