Yes. I have also found that trying to make 3D systems behave like cartographic systems is not very rewarding. Performance wise, it works much faster with simply defined colored vertices as points, rather than using textured billboards. If the billboards are allowed to have geographic scaling, that is they get larger when you zoom in, then performance is usually ok, but you have 6 vertices for each point. The same texture can be reused, so mostly you are looking at memory bloat from the additional vertices. If, on the other hand, you simply want the fancy symbol to remain about the same pixel size, you are talking about rebuilding the vertex model each time the user zooms in or out. This is computationally expensive and impractically slow for larger numbers of points. Completely nonviable for point clouds. However, you could always use simple vertices until you zoom into a certain point, and then for a small number use the billboard strategy.<br>
<br>If you are creating your triangles from a terrain map, then yes, we have done draping and it works pretty well. The recommendation I have in the draping case is to give up on the notion that the point symbol should have about the same pixel size continuously as you zoom in and out. That way, you only create one texture and then you can zoom in, zoom out, rotate and everything else using very fast GPU operations. When you zoom in close enough the texture becomes pixelated, so you might want different models for different scales like we talked about before. Once you zoom in past a certain point, you swap out your low-res vertex/texture for a higher definition model that is only for a small region. Building the model took some time for us, but only because we were creating it directly from shapefiles. In reality you would want to pre-construct the models (vertex/texture pairings) and save them using DirectX formats so that everything would work quickly while you are running things. In practice, people want to be able to change the vector content, so you might want to just stick with simple colored vertex points and lines.<br>
<br>Ted<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Michael P. Gerlek <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mpg@flaxen.com">mpg@flaxen.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">> Not that it matters, but wouldn't a point .. presumably painted as a small<br>
square .. always face toward the screen, where<br>
> two triangles representing a square has 'proper' facing and culling.<br>
<br>
</div>Yeah, I looked into that idea too some time ago, when I was trying to use<br>
WPF/Silverlight directly to render a point cloud. The technique is called<br>
"billboarding", and it is a horrible way to render points... It bloats your<br>
point budget, and the appearance is really bad at various scales. Using the<br>
GPU's native notion of a point is *much* better.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
-mpg<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
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