Alain wrote:
> Now, the only thing that can tip you is that the bilboards don't self 
> shadow. Most peoples won't notice that, it's minimised by the actual 
> texture and the shadows from the other ones.

For trees, yes, it's not too bad. I'm now working with grass and, 
depending on the variation of blade color and height, the lack of 
self-shadowing in grass is much more noticeable.

Overall, I stress to end users that these are for prototype rendering. 
Given that the "age of multicore" is getting nicely underway, I don't 
expect to compete directly with proper rendering but rather to augment 
it. Especially for animations, e.g., in high-end studios you'll see them 
render out fast or realtime OpenGL clips, which look bad, but are great 
at conveying the location, shape, motion, etc. of elements. JvS's 
two-pass suggestion for billboard generating is interesting in that it's 
a fast and easy way to preview CSG objects -- all the complexity is 
flattened into an imagemap.

Granted, this competes with simply using low-quality settings, but 
having the option could be useful, because the type of quality tradeoff 
is quite different.

Ray

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