make planes face the camera

[kimgar]

*i can see cleeearly now, the rain has gone*

yup, i thought i was missing something

different maps and accurate placement ought to cause some problems, yes - sorry about that...

[flipside]

ah a pity, I thought you knew a way of doing it with particles

[joconnell]

Make a plane with it's pivot at the bottom, birth particles on your ground using position object, assign a material static but put a multi sub object material into it - you have options to randomly assign a material id so if you put all of your materials that you want distributed you get random variation. As for the facing thing, if you apply a shape facing operator first, it'll set a shape and the rotation. If you put the shape instance with your plane object, it'll overwrite the shape but not the rotation so you'll get a shape facing effect but your plane object as the geometry.

[kimgar]

ah, nice one joconnel - great tip!

[grasshopper]

Hey olli96, Any chance you could repost me a link to your look at trees avi as the link seems to be down. Much appreciated

[Olli96]

i had to delete some stuff from my webspace so unfortunately i cant give you another link, but what i did wasn't very difficult:

[1] Create a Plane and a Dummy
[2] Align the Dummy to the Plane
[3] Select the Plane and switch to the Hierarchy Tab of the Command Panel. Choose Link Info and uncheck the x and y axis in the Inherit Rollout.
[4] Link the Plane to the Dummy and use a Path Constraint from the Dummy to the Camera. If the Plane flips after you did this, then check on keep initial offset in the constraint parameters.
[5] Thats it.

Olli

[grasshopper]

Thanks olli nice technique, I'd had the same problems as flipside until now.
I take it you ment look at constraint and not Path constraint.

[Olli96]

Of course it should read Look-At Constraint not Path Constraint.