Win32, OpenGL and ODE Physics

Billboards/Sprites

By Alan Baylis 15/09/2001

• Download for Dev-Cpp
• Download for Visual Studio 7.0
• Online Documentation

Using billboards is a very fast way to achieve halo effects, smoke, etc and before having a look at my source in main.cpp I do recommend you read a tutorial by Nate Miller on the subject. This example uses the same method as Nate describes to make a halo type billboard that always faces the camera no matter where the camera is positioned. There are also occasions when you want the billboard to rotate to face the camera but remain vertical when viewed from any position, when displaying fire or trees for example. For this reason I've also included another method for making a fire type billboard which works for a camera with 6 degrees of freedom.