Shader Showcase Saturday #7
Hi everyone!
Most of you might be familiar with a technique called billboarding. This is when a 2D quad is rendered as always facing the camera. Billboarding works really well, but it cannot be used on all objects. It is perfect for objects that look similar from all angles (like tree and grass), but yield poor results for more complex geometry. A solution to this is to rely on billboard impostors (sometimes also spelt imposters). At the core, billboard impostors are still quads that are always facing the camera. However, the image they show changes based on the viewing angle. This is possible by having a spritesheet containing renderings of how the 3D object looks like when viewed from different angles.
I have featured a few tutorials that might help you getting started with this technique:
IMP by xra (developer of Memory of a Broken Dimension)
If you need something more professional, I would also advice to have a look at the following assets:
Amplify Impostors [BETA]: the best tool to generate impostors from your existing mesh.
Imposter System: perfect if you want to use this technique in VR.
I hope this will encourage more developers to play with awesome technique, which is able to reduce ANY 3D models to just 2 triangles.