Papervision 3D Programming Tutorial - Billboards
See how effective billboards can be in creating special effects with Papervision. Demo and source code included.
VIEW THE DEMO
DOWNLOAD THE CODE
Billboard is a term that refers to a 2D plane in a 3D world whose face always points at the camera. They feature heavily in particle systems because they are computationally inexpensive, but when used in numbers can create a very detailed effect.
Papervision doesn’t have native billboards (although I believe a newer release will have a particle system built in), but it is quite trivial to make your own billboard class. The actual billboard code comes from a forum postover at Hi-definition Technologies (check out the thread here), I’ve simply incorporated it with a few small modifications into the standard framework used by all my Papervision examples. The author of this Billboard code has also created a “super billboard” class that looks quite interesting. You can check out demos of the original billboard code here, and of the super billboards here. The beauty of this Billboard code is that it extends the Plane class, meaning you can incorporate it into your own Papervision project just like a normal plane primitive.
In my example I have used the Billboards to represent falling snowflakes, in a scene surrounded by a skybox (see this post about creating a skybox in papervision). I rotate the camera around slowly so you can see that each Billboard really does always face the camera. It’s a simple effect, and surprisingly easy to achieve, but one that would be very slow to do using full 3D models.
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Hi there,
this method of using planes is a very inefficient way of creating billboards. Papervision2.0 has for some time had the ability to render particles much much faster.
I would suggest that you rewrite this tutorial to take advantage of this, and you’ll probably be able to render at least 5 times more particles.
Kindest
Seb Lee-Delisle
sebleedelisle.com
(Papervision team member)