Billboarding Tutorial

Introduction

Billboarding is a technique that adjusts an object's orientation so that it "faces" some target, usually the camera. The word faces is in quotes since it can have several meanings, as the tutorial will show.

This technique is quite popular in games and applications that require a large number of polygons. Regardless of how fast graphic cards get (Thanks Nvidia!), it seems that it is never enough. Games take advantage of the hardware advances to push things further to the next level in complexity and detail (In turn hardware manufacturers try to keep up with games designers in a never ending cycle). 3D graphics programmers in general, and game programmers in particular, have a constant struggle with the amount of polygons that can be displayed with a decent frame rate.

Billboarding can be used to cut back on the number of polygons required to model a scene by replacing geometry with an impostor texture. A classic example is a tree. Consider how many polygons would be required to get a decent representation of a tree (specially in the Spring!). Billboarding allows us to replace the geometry with a single texture applied on a quad (or two triangles). Billboarding guarantees that the texture is always facing the camera, therefore the user never realizes that the "tree" is in fact a flat texture quad, unless the user flies over it in which case the illusion is broken.

Beware that shading will not be correct if the same texture is used for all orientations. A 3D tree viewed from different locations will exhibit a different look assuming a fixed, or at least non-correlated light movement with the camera. For a 2D billboard, when using the same texture for all orientations, it will look as if the light is moving with the camera. It may be the case that the user won't notice this shading discrepancy, but be prepared for it. One possible solution is to have multiple textures taken from different views. However, unless a prohibitive number of textures is used, a popping effect will be noticeable when the texture changes. Blending may be a solution for this problem but this is outside the scope of this tutorial.

Billboarding can be used to give the illusion of a 3D object without compromising the polygons budget. However billboarding is not limited to saving polygons. In general, the billboarding technique can be applied to make any object face a target, where the target may be the camera, another object, or simply a 3D location.

In this latter scenario billboarding isn't used to save polygons but to achieve some goal related to the purpose of the application, for instance the enemy might always be facing you, or a football player is always facing the ball.

Two types of billboarding are presented: cylindrical and spherical. In the spherical version there is no restriction to the orientation of the object, whereas in the cylindrical approach the rotation of the object is restricted to a vector, usually the positive direction of the Y axis.

In this tutorial several techniques to implement billboarding will be covered. The first one is a very simple method but it doesn't provide a real billboard. It is a cheating approach that is very easy to implement. A faster approach for quad billboards that provides exactly the same results is provided afterwards. It is not as easy to implement but there can be a significant difference in speed when using a large number of quad billboards.

Finally true billboards are presented. These methods allow you to set a billboard to face the camera. they can also be used to have an object face another object or point in space. In this sense they are more general than the cheating versions.

I hope you enjoy the tutorial and if you find any bugs please e-mail me.

Antonio

[Previous] [Next: Cheating Spherical]