Ground cover billboarding

[flysouth]

Is there some way of using 3d modeled grass for within a meter or 2 of the player and then make it billboarded when further away?

[Duion]

I think only the forest has a build in billboard function, for groundcover it may be overkill, but have you tried making manual LOD levels in your modeling program and use them?

[flysouth]

But the deafult ground cover seems to be all billboarding? So if the player looks down at the grass and turns around he sees the grass at his feet all rotating. Looks bad

Are you saying that for ground cover I should just use 3d models?

[Azaezel]

http://imgur.com/a/VZvSj for basic usage of 3d shapes

http://imgur.com/DdM7lvJ for billboard creation if you haven't already generated one

[Nils]

If I'm correct, the imposters (auto billboard) don't work for 3d shapes as groundcover objects. (I should check, but no time) Think it only works for shapes where the onload() function is called; which isn't the case for groundcover.

Thought there's a possibility to add a plane mesh to your shape as LOD and use the old BB:: technique to define it as a billboard for export to DTS. But that one as pretty old; little documentation and comes with default with axis issues (if you don't know how it works).

We added a plane mesh as the lowest LOD and used the same texture to avoid an extra draw call. It works pretty well if you have a lot of objects like grass and so on:

[Nils]

And a second option; is to create 2 groundcover objects in your scene; 1 with billboards (default groundcover setting) and a second with 3d shapes. Play around with the distances and don't show the billboards until the far distance of the 3d shapes. Hope it makes sense what I've just written :lol:

[flysouth]

@Nils

How do you not show the billboards close to player?