OK, one more noob question for the day and I’m done: Does Unity have a way of making an object (like a transparency mapped billboard poly) always face the camera - like using a Look-at controller in 3D Max? If so, would using this technique to create trees buy me anything in terms of game performance, or would I be just as well off using the stock low-poly 3D trees?
really though if its for trees this is what the terrain engine is built for ; )
For trees, the terrain engine is really what you want to do - it’ll “pop” the trees into 3D when they’re nearby, ti’ll billboard them farther away, and better still when it billboards a forest, the entire forest is one mesh, not one mesh per tree. That means huge performance benefits.
Sounds like 3D trees are the way to go, then. But that billboard thing is good to know - it might come in handy sometime. Thanks guys.
is that true?
that makes me wonder, one limitation of trees is that you can’t model them too asymmetrical or it’ll be obvious that they’re cloned (like the nice japanese maple in the terrain assets - looks beautiful but more than one in view and your realism takes a hit). i was thinking of using the same model and just rotating it, or better yet modeling a few different versions that use the exact same materials.
if done within reason (maybe 5 variations of 3 different tree types) - would that affect performance too much (versus just 3 tree types but the same overall number of trees)?