9 replies to this topic

[rmoor13]

Does anyone know the most efficient way to get billboards to rotate towards the camera?

[Kablammo11]

Depends...

 

If you mean grass billboards, double click on the icon in the grass painting palette to bring up its edit window and tick the box that says "rotate to camera" (or tick it upon opening a new grass and importing the image). 

 

If you mean billboard as any other 2D plane that contains an image or a cutout and is NOT in the grass palette, there is no way to tell it to rotate to camera, not afaik. And the same would apply to 3D objects. Only grasses and bush billboards can be told to rotate.

There may be 3rd party scripts to help you with that, but these might sabotage your course since PP and CF do not work well with them.

 

Other designer guys around here: I was off for the last day. So, a help request is left unanswered by anyone for 24h? Really? Are we slacking off on our newbie rescue duties now?

[NoPutt]

Not a slacker, was just unsure of what the poster was after,

a capture would have been helpful.

Speaking of slackness, just how long of a CF hiatus

are you taking? Surely there must be something cooking

besides kittens. 

[rmoor13]

Thanks for the rescue, k11.  I was wondering how other designers were navigating around this.  I was trying to work around not using the 2-plane trees.  Thanks for the info.

[Kablammo11]

Speaking of slackness, just how long of a CF hiatus

are you taking? Surely there must be something cooking

besides kittens. 

 

Nope. I will re-enter the trade once/if the next CF upgrade is made available, presumably many moons from now. I would not want to start something new and be caught out by an upgrade in the middle of it. I crave for new CF arrows in my quiver and will not fire a shot until I get them.

 

I miss it, though. It's has become a bit of a staring contest between me and PP's glacial rate of foot-dragging progress.

I might yet blink...

Or will I? 

[highfade]

I once tried to put in people/spectators as grass objects to always face the camera. It worked fine but unfortunately they were all swaying in the wind.

[Kablammo11]

Yup. I tried the same with trees, to get more variety of them in remote parts of the plot, to get photorealistic trees (as opposed to the mediocre Speedtree fare) and to economise on tris. Same result. Also, I forgot that grass drawing distance would render remote trees invisible anyway - Doh!

 

rmoor13, if that's what you tried to achieve, it's a zero sum game: Every tree, sooner or later, is being transformed into a billboard that will rotate to camera. They all come with LOD settings (Level of Detail) that automatically trigger this.

And that's why a dense forest in the far distance affects performance a lot less than a single tree in front of your nose. 

[DPRoberts]

It would be a bit of a pain as all work arounds are but could you set billboard to 100% in LOD settings and turn off wind to get a static tree that rotates to the camera? This would be a Speedtree import obviously.

You could even place people as rectangular meshes in Speedtree with correctly done alpha as your material and then plant with Unity tree tool.

Maybe you can't control Speedtree billboard. But you could still have a plane as your LOD0 with no wind, I would think?

[IanK]

I once tried to put in people/spectators as grass objects to always face the camera. It worked fine but unfortunately they were all swaying in the wind.

That would be fine for a crowd at the Masters as most of the 'Patrons' sound drunk anyway!

[rmoor13]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I had been experimenting with camera-facing billboard
scripts and shaders to no avail. I just couldn't get them to work in JNPG.