1. Using billboards within games
4.5. Billboarding
Using billboards within games

2. Billboards
Using billboards within games

3. Billboarding
Billboarding is a rendering technique that orientates some object (typically a texture mapped quad) towards a defined target (typically the camera).
The orientation may be constrained to be along a certain axis.

4. Billboarding
Billboarding is of use as it provides a means of reducing the number of polygons that need to be rendered. This is done by replacing (potentially complex) 3d geometry with an imposter texture.
This is not a new technique!

5. Billboarding

6. Common type of billboarding
Two types of billboarding are commonly encountered:
Cylindrical
The rotation of the object is restricted to a vector, usually along the positive direction of the Y axis.
Spherical
No restriction to the orientation of the object is imposed

7. Billboards: Trees and Vegetation
The visual complexity of grass, shrubs, trees, etc. is such that it is often rendered using one or more billboards.

9. Billboards: Clouds
Overlapping billboards provide a very powerful technique for rendering clouds (which cannot be easily defined in terms of a mesh)

10. Video not available in on-line slides

11. Billboards: Explosions
Blending together a number of billboards within a set of particle effects can produce impressive explosions effects.

12. Billboards: Imposters
By capturing and representing 3D objects within the scene as separate images, it becomes possible to render the image (as a billboard) instead of the 3D object, i.e. the imposter is a simplified representation of a complex 3D object.
Dynamically-generated imposters are regenerated at runtime by rendering an image of a 3D object to a texture.

13. Volumetric Billboards
Volumetric billboards use volumetric images of an object stored into 3D textures, instead of 2D images as for standard billboards.
A rendering approach can visually reconstruct the object, offering parallax effects, reduced popping artefacts, etc.

14. Video not available in on-line slides

15. Directed Reading Directed reading concerning billboarding Directed

16. Directed
reading
Directed reading:
Read Billboarding Tutorial – for introductory information on how to render cylindrical or spherical billboards.
Read Real-Time Cloud Rendering for Games – for an exploration of cloud rendering using billboards.
Read Rendering Forest Scenes in Real-Time – for details on reducing large forest scenes using billboards.
Read Spherical Billboards and their Application to Rendering Explosions – for information on how spherical billboards can be used for explosions.

17. Directed
reading
Directed reading:
Read Volumetric Billboards – for more information on volumetric billboard creation/rendering.
Read Billboard Clouds for Extreme Model Simplication – for information on using a “billboard cloud” as a means of simplifying a 3D object.
Read Dynamic 2D Imposters: A Simple, Efficient DirectX 9 Implementation – for information on how to implement dynamic imposters at:

18. To do: Summary Read the directed reading
Today we explored:
The variety of uses that billboarding offers within games.
To do:
Read the directed reading
Think if you would like to implement any aspect of billboarding within your project?