Irrlicht Engine

Now with textures on. Damn tri-planar mapping is expensive.

10.000 GPU based billboards rendered in a single draw call



I guess that with a terrain things would look better...

So, point sprites and maybe instancing?

No, there is no instancing, It is simply a lot of square polygons. So far, i don't know how to use point sprites in Irrlicht, Maybe i am reinventing the wheel ^^U

Anyway, it is already improved to have fog, wind and support for tangent space. But with 16 bit indices, it can't have more than 16384 billboards inside a single meshbuffer

Yeah, point sprites would allow for 65k quads. But since Irrlicht does not provide a way to use vertex buffers with special primitive types, it wouldn't be a GPU based rendering. So probably not faster anyway. But you do the alignment in the vertex shader then?

Yes, that's it. Actually, think of each billboard, they are quads, in which each vertex is placed in a corner of the normalized texture space. So, placing the vertices in the center of each quad, and moving them to their proper place using as reference the mapping coordinates, you can process all the quads of a mesh so they face the camera, and that's pretty much everything. The good point is that simply with the position, and the texture coordinates, you can create the rest of the information you need, and, as they are simple scene nodes, they can be rotated, translated and scaled like anything else.

Even with a shader rotating them, point sprites would be faster though. But if Irr doesn't expose them, you'd need to do manual GL.

As I said, you can use point sprites. But it's not possible to combine them with the hardware mapping hints (yet). So right now it's either or.

Sorry, I misunderstood your post as not even with sw draw calls.

Billboards integrated in the project

What framerates do you get? and how many polys in that scene?
You should use this screenshot in the competition instead of the other one

@fmx: My guess is: abt. 24k for character model + abt. 10k for the visible part of the scene. FPS are probably in the 80-120 range.

27k for the character, and as for the visible stage, you aren't counting wha lies behind that part, which has around 5k triangles more. So, around 15k. The framerate is around 80 fps. I chose the other screenshot for the contest because i wanted to focus on the billboards, not the character.

Add some random scales to the grass = perfect (maybe some color variation too if possible). by the way you some have shinny rocks there

I have already added the color variation. The scales and the wind... I hope to achieve that effect soon...