"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
> > An idea off the top of my head: Instead of a flat billboard, you could make a
> > simple low-rez height_field for the tree (including the trunk too, possibly).
>
> Hmmm.
> If a heightfield is just a displacement based on the grayscale value of the
> image pixels, then you could also make an isosurface of it, and abs() should
> mirror the
> displacement in both directions.
> Then I think there's the isosurface approximation macros that could make a
> mesh{} of _that_, and then you could possibly make a whole 3D tree from just the
> image.
> Alternatively, I guess you could just intersect{} it with a box and texture it
> with the image_map and see how that turns out...
>

I was actually thinking that a sort of dome-shaped, low-rez crinkly HF (with
'smooth', and 'water_level' to clip off the ground plane), could then be rotated
-90*x, then aligned to the camera view like Thomas did with his billboards. With
the tree texture applied, that would make a quasi-3D tree shape, at least for
the 'bulk of tree leaves' if not the trunk, and it might pick up some
semi-realistic lighting highlights if phong is used. It wouldn't matter that the
HF is just a shell; its underside ('rear') would never be seen, since the HF
would always face the camera.

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