My attempts to recreate such an effect using the BillboardControl(s) attached to quads on the nodes of a rigged mesh resulted in some verry strange transformation. I don’t know if it matters, but the quads were modeled in Blender with the wrest of the model as separate geometry, not instances of Quad geometry, and the animated model was exported a a GLTF file. The animation and location of the quads looked fine until the billboard control was attached to the respective geometry.
I have working with JMonkeyEngine since 2.0 this is a new alias.
Doesn’t billboard control make the quad face the player all the time? Wouldnt that look really odd for something pretending to be a 3d object facing in a particular direction.
But could you include a screenshot of the odd look
2 Blue arms made from a single quad using 64x64 pixel texture. 2 Blue Legs made from a single quad using a 64x64 pixel texture shared with the arms. 2 Yellow hands made for a single quad using its own 64x64 texture.1Black body made form 2 quads using 2 textures.
The strangeness of it is the beauty of it. It really goes to that nostalgic or retro feel.
I thought it would be nice of me to include the textures in question. Can you imagine how strange this thing looks without the billboard effect rotating each sphere texture to face the camera viewport?
I dont know where billboard control expects the root to be. But if they rotate strangly that would be the first point i would check. Probably it wants the root to be at the center of the quad.
Even likely that it requires a quad on some specific axis. And not an arbitrary placed quad.
That’s what I thought as well, but that’s exactly where the center of each quad is, in the center of the four vertices. After posting this I had a similar thought my guess what that it’s expecting the center of the mesh to be in one of the four corners. which would make since when thinking about JMonkey’s Quad Geometry that seems to be designed for the guiNode or gui viewport instead of the 3D viewport.
Well I need to record my animation with and without the billboard control, while I am doing that I will attach quickly create a test scene with a debug arrow and attach the billboard control to it.
In classic JMonkeyEngine community fashion, I have decided to create my own control to handle all Sprites at the same time. I’m just going to reuse the code from the particle emitter and provide it Spatial(s) to rotate instead of using the particle geometry. i know i could set up and influencer and use a particle emitter but that would probably introduce issues when left alone for too long as particles have a lifetime.
