Billboard Baker Pro & Addons

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50154

Billboard Baker Pro enables you to generate billboards of every object you like. I developed it, becuse I needed a fast mobile solution to render far objects like houses. It can be used for standalone, web and mobile plattforms.


These buildings use the Billboard Baker system (here the shader alpha handling was set to opacity cutout) to generate far lod stages of every horizontal view direction.

I added dynamic batching to reduce the batches that were rendered each frame. This means, the billboards are dynamically batched into bigger mesh chunks instead of rendering each frame seperate.


I then focused on reducing the drawcalls (SetPass calls) by integrating an atlasing solution. The Atlasing addon should be on the asset store soon:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/57601

With the atlasing addon installed you can reduce the drawcalls drastically.



I recently updated the companys roadmap (http://www.nexusgamesoft.com/roadmap.php) for the next quarter and plan to add an Vegetation Addon.

The vegetation addon should bring life to the trees, bushes and grass as a function of wind zones. To achieve this i will bake the wind zone information into the billboard meshes and then use vertex and uv displacement to simulate bending of branches and leaves.

New information is also available on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SkandYxy

I'm looking forward for your feedback

 

Looks promising! Are the billboards baked on demand at runtime or upfront in the editor? Also, will this support lighting changes (day/night cycle) and what about realtime GI?

 

Thanks!
The billboards are currently baked previous in the editor. My idea is to add optional functionalitys and dynamic lighting is a feature that would also be important to create an animation addon. My idea respective dynamic lighting is to bake an albedo texture upfront and create normal maps from the 3d model. Then one could use a pbr like shader to render both. Although the rendered billboard is only a quad the normal map would give it an three dimensional relief with shadows and contour like the 3d model. Realtime GI would therefore work with lightprobes.

 

That sounds great - the uv bending for the tree billboards is an especially cool idea! Looking forward to seeing the progress

 

Working with Billboard Baker Pro in custom setup.

Many changes were made since last post:

* New baking algorithm calculates correct color&alpha values
* Bugfixes & ongoing work on stability
* Updated manual
* Complete new feature for dynamic lighting (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/72246) based on phong shader.

Here is an example how I used dynamic lighting addon in a scene with Enviro, Scion, RTP and PlayWay Water.
I often get to the point, where I have many geometry in my scene and want to increase performance whilst keeping far distance view.

The ship here uses a dynamic lit billboard in far distance.



If you get closer it turns to a mesh with almost no visual difference.


To achieve this i had to adapt the billboard dynamic lighting shader to work in the scene. It was created with shaderforge and you can simple adapt it to your needs. By default it uses alphablending.



But alphablending not works best with fog at the moment, so i changed it to opacity clip.



I also and changed blending settings accordingly and enabled fog.



The next month I want to test the system even more and improve it's stability&solve possible issues.

 

Hi, is this still in development? It looks cool but no posts for a while. I am curious about using this with other objects than just trees.

 

Hello. I recently purchased and installed this asset and it does not function.

Unity Console is reporting the following error:

InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from source type to destination type.
Billboard.Awake () (at Assets/Billboard Baker Pro/Scripts/Billboard.cs:209)

I'm using Unity Free Version 2017.1.0b2 on Windows 10.

I've tried this on a new project with no other assets loaded to make sure there wasn't anything else that could be causing the issue, but I'm thinking that perhaps this asset hasn't been updated to work with the latest version of Unity?

The strange thing is that on my other project using the same version of Unity, I got it to create billboards a few times, but now it only crashes when I try to run "Bake All Billboards."

Any help resolving this matter would be much appreciated.

 

Any updates to report? Are you still on track for the October 1 stability and bugfixing update as published on your roadmap?

 

Hi,

I want to announce a new version called Billboard Creator 2 that is different from current version.

Features:
- smarter
- thus will have less bugs than previous version
- right click on a fbx file and click create billboard to add a billbord to the fbx file utilising autodesks fbx sdk
- create billboards in background with a hidden layer and rendertexture
- get rid of static lighting
- uber billboard shader that handles 4 different unity shaders at once
- ability to use the generated fbx files like normal 3d models in other projects

Best,
Andre

 

Hi,

This is exactly what I am looking for.
Do you know when it will be released ?

 

Hi Hexaedre,

I cant tell by now, but i can tell it will replace BBP and cost no upgrade price. But price of BC2 will increase.

Current progress:
- created fbx dll to communicte between fbxsdk and unity because its an unmanaged dll
- added context menu
- am writing bake process for render texture and as user its hidden, you will see progress in unity statusbar

Best,
Andre

 

Additional feature:

- if desired autocreation of mesh lod stages

 

Hi,

Any news ? I am really looking for this asset.
I read that BBP is not working with the latest version of Unity.
What is the last version of Unity that is compatible with your asset ?

The links in the description of BBP on the asset store are not working.

Cheers

 

Hey Hexaedre,

Yes, i am actually working on importing the fbx model, identifying how many lod stages are already setup and to set up lod nodes accordingly. I also work on storing the fbx file in the same fbx version as loaded.

Where did you read this? I know it works with 5.6.0 as I tested it myself. Which link? I will check asap.

Best,
Andre

 

I'm getting these errors when trying to build in Unity 5.6.4p3.

• Shader error in 'Billboard Baker Pro/Billboard Shader Multitexture Dynamic Lighting': invalid subscript '_ShadowCoord' at line 195 (on d3d11)
• Shader error in 'Billboard Baker Pro/Billboard Shader Multitexture Dynamic Lighting': invalid subscript '_ShadowCoord' 'UnityComputeForwardShadows': no matching 3 parameter function at line 195 (on d3d11)
• Shader error in 'Billboard Baker Pro/Billboard Shader Multitexture Dynamic Lighting': invalid subscript '_ShadowCoord' 'unitySampleShadow': no matching 1 parameter function at line 195 (on d3d11)

 

Hey,

Can it generate billboard at runtime ? Also any news in your V2?

Thanks in advance

 

Hi blitzvb,

No, current version can only bake when you're in edit mode. BC2 bakes using render textures in a parallel process and stores resulting fbx files on hdd, so here it could be realized better.
I just work on fixing issues related to macos. With bc2 i made no big steps as i'm a fulltime engineer and also do voluntary service and did not find the time yet.

Best,
Andre

 

Macos seems to handle baking in slightly different way. Had to setup a virtual machine to reproduce the issues related to macos.

I will release a new update soon. On windows I tested it with Unity 2017.3.0f3 without major problems.

Best,
Andre

 

Hi,

Am uploading 1.5.1 with bugfixes:
- above wasn't caused by macosx but by low game/sceneview resolution
- fixed loss of settings after bake/loading scene

Best,
Andre

 

When I bake in Dynamic Lighting, the result shown in billboard is all black.It seems th normal map is not correct.What shall I do?

 

Hello drlh1976,

please send me a downloadlink of an example project via mail and i will try to reproduce the behaviour on my side and find a solution.

Best,
Andre

 

Hi wildstyle69,

am uploading update today fixing all shader errors/warnings related to open gl.

Best,
Andre

 

I'm wondering how you would go about getting the billboards to be bigger, because right now it's taking the photographs small.

 

Okay, so after setting the billboard script to 3 or 4 per asset it's actually coming out very good!

My only question now is about static batching. Do I make it so that the imposter is not batched? I made them all static batched and it won't show from multiple views. Will test it more tomorrow, so far this is looking great!

 

Could I use a different shader with the billboards? What shader does this use, is it the default Unity billboard?