Volumetric Billboards

[JeGX]

Link: http://www.antisphere.com/Research/VolumetricBillboards.php

The Volumetric Billboards representation extends the classic billboards representation used to render complex 3D objects in real-time. It uses volumetric images of an object stored into 3D textures, instead of 2D images as for classic billboards. Combined with a dedicated real-time rendering algorithm based on GPU geometry shader, volumetric billboards offer full parallax effect of the objects from any viewing direction without popping artifact, along with improved anti-aliasing of distant objects. The objects can have transparency and can be arbitrarily distributed in a 3D scene. The algorithm correctly handles transparency between the multiple and possibly overlapping objects. Furthermore, volumetric billboards can be easily integrated into common rasterization-based renderers, which allows for their concurrent use with polygonal models and standard rendering techniques such as shadow-mapping.