The present work introduces the concept of relief impostors: an efficient manner of representing objects by images in systems that require real time rendering, such as 3D games and virtual reality environments. For this purpose, typical methods of image-based rendering are mixed with traditional geometry based rendering methods. This technique only requires from the user the geometric modeling of the entity to be represented. After this, the system synthesizes relief textures, dynamically refreshed when necessary, and renders them using the method of relief texture mapping. This approach allows complex models to be inserted into the real time pipeline system. This complexity arise either from the geometric nature of the model or its process of visualization. Also, the relief impostors try to use the idle time or parallel resources available on the processor, in order to balance the work to be done between the CPU and GPU. Furthermore, they make possible the representation of any kind of geometric object by the relief texture mapping technique.