Overview

This is the most used particle renderer. It displays the particles as textured sprites.

It has various options to control how the particles are displayed, rotated, scaled, which texture is mapped on them..

This renderer is supported in all of our public engine integrations.

Billboards are displayed onscreen based on an input position, size, color and additional per particle or static properties (see billboard renderer node reference).

Billboarding modes

Billboard renderers support various billboarding modes (alignments):

Screen aligned

4 vertices / 2 triangles per particle

A screen-aligned billboard has its plane parallel to the screen plane.

Looking around and rotating the view camera changes the billboard orientation, while only changing the camera position doesn’t.

Viewpos aligned

4 vertices / 2 triangles per particle

A viewpos-aligned quad has its plane normal pointing towards the camera position.

Unlike screen-aligned quads, looking around does not change the billboard geometry.

Axis aligned

4 vertices / 2 triangles per particle

This billboard mode stretches the billboard geometry along the user-provided axis.

The billboard rotates around the specified axis to try facing the camera

Axis aligned spheroid

4 vertices / 2 triangles per particle

Unlike the AxisAligned billboarding mode, this one doesn’t suffer from the grazing-angle problem, where the particle appears to vanish when the billboarding axis becomes near-perpendicular with the screen plane.

Instead, this billboarder emulates a spheroid, and binds the screenspace projection of the spheroid with a quad. This fixes the artifacts of the AxisAligned mode

Axis aligned capsule

6 vertices / 4 triangles per particle

Particles rendered using this billboarder, like the AxisAlignedSpheroid, won’t seem to disappear at grazing angles.

Builds a 6-vertex geometry around the particle. Stretches the texture on its diagonal.

Plane aligned

4 vertices / 2 triangles per particle

Planar aligned billboarders use two axes for billboarding: like the axial billboarder, a main axis, lying on the plane, and the plane normal vector.