Billboard Groups (FBX)

Billboard Groups

A Billboard Group is an exclusive rendering path for billboards.

• Through this path, you can render a batch of billboards very quickly.

• The fundamental requirement is that these billboards have the exact same parameters, such as material and properties in the user buffer of 3DSMax.

• During export, only parameters of the first billboard for each group are evaluated. The same parameters are assigned to all the other billboards of the group.

• The exporter must be set with the optimizations of the active vertices.

• They work with these techniques:

  • Default

  • DOF HDR B

  • For the First-bounce technique, Global Illumination requires a special shader; for example, shBillboards.

Mesh specifications

The mesh to be grouped must comply with the following requirements:

• They must use the Billboard Shader.

• Only szBillboardType = YAxis is supported, in the Shader Billboard.

• Each mesh must have four vertices and two faces.

• The size and shape of the mesh may vary. It is still recommended to create a square and then copy, rescale, and modify it to create the other meshes.

• VertexColor and UV can be different in every mesh, the important thing is that they use the same material and the same UserBuffer.

Visibility options

• See Visibility Options (FBX).

Further optimizations

• The concept behind the BillboardGroup is grouping. Increased mesh grouping improves rendering speed.

• For example, if I know that in a certain area there are three types of neighboring "tree" meshes and I want to group them instead of creating three groups, from 10 meshes each, it would be appropriate to create a texture that includes the three trees and assign then the same parameters (texture) to all the meshes. So you can create a group only that shares the same parameters and is drawn at once (rather than having so many groups with a texture each when I know that probably are always be drawn together).