billboarding alternatives

[matt tagliaferri]

I've got some great tree bitmaps that I'd like to get into a 3d scene,
but I can't use billboarding because the application allows for the
user to rotate above the scene (it's a house that I'd like to add
landscaping to, and the camera spins around the house ala the game
Homeworld).

Does anyone know of some quick and dirty alternatives to billboarding
trees (or other objects) that will work ok when the camera is above
the objects as well?

If not, know where I can get a decent 3d tree/shrub library?

matt tag

[bobrock]

>If not, know where I can get a decent 3d tree/shrub
>library?

imo the best 3d tree library is "onyx tree" plugin for
3dStudio (or standalone application)
You can export the 3d model in .x format with one of
exporter (there's one in the sdk)
The problem is: too many polygon!!!!

bobrock

[Ted Howard]

Some games will do a series of textures at various angles to each other. So,
you're not rotating them to face the camera, but each tree may be 2 vertical
textures at right angles and 2 horizontal textures at different heights in
the tree. Admittedly, this is not a good solution, but maybe it's a start.

-Ted

"matt tagliaferri" <mtag...@cleindians.com> wrote in message
news:2cc74fa4.03121...@posting.google.com...

[Justin Rogers]

No matter what angle you are looking at the tree from you can billboard it.
You just have
to compute which texture to display on the billboard sprite. A nice way to
get the appropriate
textures is to actually render a fully 3D high poly tree and then take
snapshots at various angles.
Once you have your basic tree from multiple directions you can either do a
direct switch or you
can blend between the vertical versus horiztonal textures to achieve some
pretty nice results. Add
a pixel shader on top to fuzzify the whole process a bit and you can present
a good number of trees to
the user without a big performance hit.

If the user is expected to look closely at a single tree, you can change
your rendering behavior to take
this into account so that the high quality 3D model is actually rendered
instead.

--
Justin Rogers
DigiTec Web Consultants, LLC.

"Ted Howard" <ted_yantis at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
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