Billboard Baker Pro enables you to generate billboards of every object you like. I developed it, becuse I needed a fast mobile solution to render far objects like houses. It can be used for standalone, web and mobile plattforms.
These buildings use the Billboard Baker system (here the shader alpha handling was set to opacity cutout) to generate far lod stages of every horizontal view direction.
I added dynamic batching to reduce the batches that were rendered each frame. This means, the billboards are dynamically batched into bigger mesh chunks instead of rendering each frame seperate.
The vegetation addon should bring life to the trees, bushes and grass as a function of wind zones. To achieve this i will bake the wind zone information into the billboard meshes and then use vertex and uv displacement to simulate bending of branches and leaves.
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Looks promising! Are the billboards baked on demand at runtime or upfront in the editor? Also, will this support lighting changes (day/night cycle) and what about realtime GI?
Thanks!
The billboards are currently baked previous in the editor. My idea is to add optional functionalitys and dynamic lighting is a feature that would also be important to create an animation addon. My idea respective dynamic lighting is to bake an albedo texture upfront and create normal maps from the 3d model. Then one could use a pbr like shader to render both. Although the rendered billboard is only a quad the normal map would give it an three dimensional relief with shadows and contour like the 3d model. Realtime GI would therefore work with lightprobes.
Here is an example how I used dynamic lighting addon in a scene with Enviro, Scion, RTP and PlayWay Water.
I often get to the point, where I have many geometry in my scene and want to increase performance whilst keeping far distance view.
The ship here uses a dynamic lit billboard in far distance.
To achieve this i had to adapt the billboard dynamic lighting shader to work in the scene. It was created with shaderforge and you can simple adapt it to your needs. By default it uses alphablending.
Hello. I recently purchased and installed this asset and it does not function.
Unity Console is reporting the following error:
InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from source type to destination type. Billboard.Awake () (at Assets/Billboard Baker Pro/Scripts/Billboard.cs:209)
I’m using Unity Free Version 2017.1.0b2 on Windows 10.
I’ve tried this on a new project with no other assets loaded to make sure there wasn’t anything else that could be causing the issue, but I’m thinking that perhaps this asset hasn’t been updated to work with the latest version of Unity?
The strange thing is that on my other project using the same version of Unity, I got it to create billboards a few times, but now it only crashes when I try to run “Bake All Billboards.”
Any help resolving this matter would be much appreciated.
Any news ? I am really looking for this asset.
I read that BBP is not working with the latest version of Unity.
What is the last version of Unity that is compatible with your asset ?
The links in the description of BBP on the asset store are not working.
Yes, i am actually working on importing the fbx model, identifying how many lod stages are already setup and to set up lod nodes accordingly. I also work on storing the fbx file in the same fbx version as loaded.
Where did you read this? I know it works with 5.6.0 as I tested it myself. Which link? I will check asap.
I’m getting these errors when trying to build in Unity 5.6.4p3.
Shader error in ‘Billboard Baker Pro/Billboard Shader Multitexture Dynamic Lighting’: invalid subscript ‘_ShadowCoord’ at line 195 (on d3d11)
Shader error in ‘Billboard Baker Pro/Billboard Shader Multitexture Dynamic Lighting’: invalid subscript ‘_ShadowCoord’ ‘UnityComputeForwardShadows’: no matching 3 parameter function at line 195 (on d3d11)
Shader error in ‘Billboard Baker Pro/Billboard Shader Multitexture Dynamic Lighting’: invalid subscript ‘_ShadowCoord’ ‘unitySampleShadow’: no matching 1 parameter function at line 195 (on d3d11)
No, current version can only bake when you’re in edit mode. BC2 bakes using render textures in a parallel process and stores resulting fbx files on hdd, so here it could be realized better.
I just work on fixing issues related to macos. With bc2 i made no big steps as i’m a fulltime engineer and also do voluntary service and did not find the time yet.