Tapdancing Goats » 3d http://www.tapdancinggoats.com A parfait of physics, Linux, LaTeX, and coding tips large and small. Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:14:39 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Better billboarding in Papervision3D http://www.tapdancinggoats.com/better-billboarding-in-papervision3d.htm http://www.tapdancinggoats.com/better-billboarding-in-papervision3d.htm#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:42:30 +0000 Alex http://www.tapdancinggoats.com/better-billboarding-in-papervision3d.htm The Papervision3D wiki has an example for making billboarded sprites with just three extra lines of code. Trouble is, it doesn’t really work. Anyone who’s tried it may have noticed that when the planes get too close to the camera, or if the camera rotates around it’s z-axis at all, the planes start rolling instead of staying vertical.

The problem is that the lookAt method defaults to using the world y-axis as “up” for the billboards, which isn’t usually correct. Of course we don’t really care about the world y-axis with billboards. We just want them to be vertical in the camera. Here’s some code that does it.

// calculate the camera vertical in world coordinates
var up : Number3D = new Number3D(0, 1, 0);
Matrix3D.rotateAxis(camera.transform, up);

// billboard is the plane you want to billboard.
billboard.lookAt(viewpoint, up);
billboard.roll(180);
billboard.pitch(180);
]]> http://www.tapdancinggoats.com/better-billboarding-in-papervision3d.htm/feed 1