Question about pre-rendered billboard backrounds.

NOlhovskis

Hello. I want to create a cityscape in the background of a level I'm currently working on. Obviously, it would be a waste of time and budget to actually model and texture building meshes, so I want to go with a pre-rendered billboard approach.
I tried creating a huge cylinder without caps around the playable area, to use the walls as a billboard. However a texture required for it would be way too large, with a weird aspect ratio of something like 16:1. Maybe a set of 5-10 clusters of buildings on separate planes is a better way to do it? At least they are reusable this way.

In any case, I couldn't find that many examples of implementation. Deus Ex: HR used giant pre-rendered backgrounds, but there is no technical info on how it is actually positioned and whether there are any overlapping planes. Same with other examples I could think of.

So if anyone has any advice on how I should go about this, I'd be very grateful.

Harbinger

Go with smaller, stacked billboards so you can layer them and get some parallax. You could even just texture page a ton of buildings on one texture and build out a lot of different variations. You'll also probably want to texture them as if they were regular diffuse textures and utilize in-game lighting to help them blend with the playable environment.

NOlhovskis

Thanks for the advice, Harbinger.

I tried making a simple texture with some simple building shapes and placing the planes with cut outs in the background. Which seems to work rather well.



I'll probably add some parallax to the material to make the certain bits stand out when I'll actually render out the images. Hopefully it will not influence the performance too much.

Harbinger

No problem! BTW, I didn't mean add a parallax material, just to layer the buildings in front of and behind each other.

NOlhovskis

Yes, I understood what you meant. Just thought that additional parallax of the actual material can be useful here.