Billboards Creator

[newborn]

Tired of taking screenshots one by one to make billboards out of your 3d models? Here comes Billboards Creator: a tool that generates 8 images for a total of 360 degrees of rotation of your 3d mesh!

[Rynus_Rein]

Handy tool for sure ^_^

[darqSHADOW]

Nice Newborn!  Should give some people an idea of how to use these as imposters in their apps, as well.  

DS

[Zaknafein]

Oooh, excellent!
But instead of colorkeying, I hope you'll give the capability of an alpha channel...

[newborn]

Oooh, excellent!
But instead of colorkeying, I hope you'll give the capability of an alpha channel...

If you have an idea for alpha channel, please be my guest and post your ideas here...
Mainly, how it works, is that the program rotates the mesh, takes a screenshot, rotates the mesh, takes a screenshot, etc. Colorkey was the only I could think of...

[Zaknafein]

Hmm... you use 6.5, just make a shader! Well, two.

First shader renders the mesh with no alpha channel. Backdrop color doesn't really matter, but could be black. i.e. OutputColor.rgb = Texture.rgb
Second shader renders only the alpha channel on a black backdrop. i.e. OutputColor.rgb = Texture.a
Render with first shader, save a screenshot. Render with second shader, take a screenshot. Then load the both screenshot with .Net graphics stuff, and mix the RGB and A channels, and output a TGA or something similar. Voilà.

Only problem is that it wouldn't really work along well with FSAA, but then again your method wouldn't work either. The edge AA-ed pixels would be magenta-ish in your method, and with an alpha channel they'd be black-ish. But the texture alpha channel filtering would look way better in my method.

[Pavel]

set the meshes Texture to 0, material to 0.. (or 1?)
set the background to black.

and u have urself a Opacity Map... use it with the directx dds maker to make a dds or ur favourite image editor to make png or whatever.

[Zaknafein]

Uuh Pavel, that wouldn't fix anything. It's just like putting a black colorkey, except the alphablended textures on the mesh would just not be alpha'ed.

Besides he has a point on the DDS. No need to load the shots and save it in your code, you can just apply the alpha texture to a color texture with DxTex.

[billythekid]

This is pretty cool, but I got a question. Isnt a billboard just a 2D texture that always faces the camera? If thats the case, I dont really understand how this tool would help. BTW Im not downing you, I just dont understand. Regardless its still pretty cool.

[tweakbox]

well, it enables you to take a high poly tree mesh, for example, and create a billboard texture of it for far distance viewing.  That's the point.  The axis rotation allows for a bit more realistic billboard that doesn't rotate to face the camera, because I'm sure you noticed, that always looks like sh** because you can see it rotating.

So, that's the purpose

[billythekid]

Ah ok.

[Borys Pomianek]

This is pretty cool, but I got a question. Isnt a billboard just a 2D texture that always faces the camera? If thats the case, I dont really understand how this tool would help. BTW Im not downing you, I just dont understand. Regardless its still pretty cool.

Bilboards can rotate os stay stationary.

In most old games and in new ones when we dont talk about important stuff things like trees, bushes etc. are show using for instance 8 biboards.

They all are place in the same place an just rateted so that if you have 8 bibloards each of the bibloard is rotated 45 degrees and it looks more realistic than if you would use 1 bibloards that just rotates with the camera.

BP

[Zaknafein]

What happened to this? Just curious...

[ovek]

If you have an idea for alpha channel, please be my guest and post your ideas here...
Mainly, how it works, is that the program rotates the mesh, takes a screenshot, rotates the mesh, takes a screenshot, etc. Colorkey was the only I could think of...

is it possible to render the view to a render surface and then save that?

[obi-2-kenobi]

why not just use a mesh?

[pizzayoyo]

It's already been discussed in this thread. Meshes take up more FPS than a simple billboard, and when one can't tell the difference it's perfect.

[Dan]

It's a very handy tool for generating Billboards for a LOD system.

If an object is off in the distance you don't need to waste poly's on rendering detail that won't be appreciated.
The diagram below is taken from speed tree which additionally reduces the polycount the further away the tree is. but it should illistrate the point of Newborns app.



 A Simple billboard works great and having 8 angle shots is fine making the snap from poly tree to billboard almost un-noticable. The only way to improve this would be to generate the billboard on the fly by rendering the tree/object to a rendersurface and saving the resultant texture. The texture would only need to be updated when the camera angle changes beyong a certain value.

[newborn]

The part of exporting is completed. Now, I'm coding a small thingie that will crop the images exported and get rid of the TV logo at the bottom by cropping the images

[Zaknafein]

OK, good

[Lil`Buh]

It's a very handy tool for generating Billboards for a LOD system.

If an object is off in the distance you don't need to waste poly's on rendering detail that won't be appreciated.
The diagram below is taken from speed tree which additionally reduces the polycount the further away the tree is. but it should illistrate the point of Newborns app.



 A Simple billboard works great and having 8 angle shots is fine making the snap from poly tree to billboard almost un-noticable. The only way to improve this would be to generate the billboard on the fly by rendering the tree/object to a rendersurface and saving the resultant texture. The texture would only need to be updated when the camera angle changes beyong a certain value.

Dan do you have any code illustrating this ? i might be interrested later on