what is a billboard?

Toobis

Seen these for sale around the store and although they are explained I really don't get what they are or do exactly.

Anyone care to enlighten me on what these things are exactly pls.

Richard Haseltine

A billboard, in tis context, is a pre-rendered 2D image applied to a plane - it's a very memory-efficient way of adding elements to a render, though of course all the lighting and shading is fixed. The Now Crowd sets expand on this by providing multiple angles on each element (which is why the products are so large) and a tool to let you load the right version for the camera placement.

Chohole

Its a board  that you put a bill on. I guess you could also do it to Tom, Dick or Harry, and even their girl friends.  

In it's simplest usage  you use a plane, apply an image with attached trans map.  Works on trans maps, so a way of getting multiple people or things into a scene without millions of polys   (unless you actually wanted  tons of parrots floating around,  then you could put parrots on the bill boards.)

I guess the products make use of this somehow.

In Bryce we call them picture objects.

nicstt

I see Chohole has been drinking the happy cola.

They can be useful, preferably imo where you are using plenty of depth of field to blur them out.

The Blurst of Times

The multiplane cyclorama is a similar approach to using a billboard. The idea is the same. Flat prop give an illusion of depth behind your subject.

There are other products that use flat or curved planes to establish a lightweight background. I've made my own billboards and flat planar effects (background filter, caustic effects, shadows from overhead foliage)... It's not difficult.

The end result of a render is a composed 2D image, so why not use flat background pieces? Spend your system resources at render time on what matters.

Peter Wade

Chohole said:

Its a board  that you put a bill on. I guess you could also do it to Tom, Dick or Harry, and even their girl friends.  

In it's simplest usage  you use a plane, apply an image with attached trans map.  Works on trans maps, so a way of getting multiple people or things into a scene without millions of polys   (unless you actually wanted  tons of parrots floating around,  then you could put parrots on the bill boards.)

...

This is very true. Also, if you remove the billboard before rendering to depict a parrot that has flown away it requires no memory or processing power at all. This means there is no limit to the number of Polly gones you can render even on a low spec machne.

FirstBastion

They are flat planes, usually vertical for trees and buildings in the distance.  They generally have no depth. Some billboards may have a slight curve to them.  The Daz Millenium environment uses billboards.  They can be used to fill up distant backgrounds,  they don't interact with sunlight very well,  because they have pre rendered images on them so shadow often don't match the scene lighting.  

WillowRaven

I've used billboard plants, tree, and even people to put far-away filler items (like crowds of people or to fill a stadium or a distant treeline). They come in handy. I just bought a couple of now-crow sets a couple of days ago (zombies and droids).

McGyver

Here is a very lame example of what a Billboard looks like...

Figure 1 probably should be worded differently, but I’m tired and the hard lemonade is kicking in...

 

Figure 2... With the camera rotated slightly you can see that the images are flat.

 

Billboards can make for very quick, low resource renders... or in this case, very cheesy ones...