Billboard objects

[Guest]

chris,

marc suggested earlier in this thread that it may be useful to provide an option where billboard objects could be made to always face the observer, specifically for use with nebulae. This seems to be a very reasonable suggestion given the difficulties of volumetric rendering and creating 3D fictitious meshes. What are your thoughts on this?

frank

[Broken]

Billboarding is pretty easy. Here's a good article: http://www.flipcode.com/articles/articl ... ards.shtml

[chris]

Billboarding is pretty easy. Here's a good article: http://www.flipcode.com/articles/articl ... ards.shtml

Thanks for the link, but I already know how billboarding works. In fact, when stars-as-points is off, the stars are all rendered as small billboards. Galaxies are also rendered with potentially thousands of billboards.

--Chris

[Broken]

D'oh! How obvious was that :)

[selden]

But it is quite interesting for us non-grapihcs professionals!

[selden]

I've updated the DSC catalogs for the Hubble Carina and NOAO NGC 3372 billboards. There still are some very small positional errors, but now the dark wisps of the absorption nebulae actually look like they're part of the same object (excpt for the colors).



A 4MB zip file containing a merged DSC file, models and DDS images for both objects is now available at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/carina.zip

Details are at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/billboard.html#5.3