History: SoC2006 BillboardClouds

            __Student:__     Mats Leksell (swx)

__Mentor:__ Andres Carrera (Lioric)

__Status:__ Experimental, obtain it from ogreaddons/billboardclouds

!Overview
The concept of billboard clouds were introduced by Xavier Décoret et al as a way of simplifying a complex model to a small number of view independent billboards while preserving the visible quality of the output.

More information can be found here:

[http://w3imagis.imag.fr/Publications/2003/DDSD03/index.gb.html|Billboard Clouds for Extreme Model Simplification]

[http://www.vrvis.at/vr/billboardclouds|Forest rendering]

!Objective
Create an easy to use library for creating a billboard cloud from an input mesh.

!Progress
__Implemented a simpler plane selection algorithm__
( as described here: [http://www.cs.utah.edu/~lacewell/billboardclouds/index.html] )

[http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/4417/top16cs.png]

[http://img488.imageshack.us/img488/7048/left12rp.png]
{img fileId="12" thumb="y" alt="left12rp.png" rel="box[g]"}
[http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/369/front10el.png]

__Implemented an image packing algorithm__

[http://img488.imageshack.us/img488/9306/packing4mn.png]
{img fileId="13" thumb="y" alt="packing4mn.png" rel="box[g]"}
__Implemented texture generation__

[http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/3391/bettertexture9ns.png]
{img fileId="14" thumb="y" alt="bettertexture9ns.png" rel="box[g]"} 
__Implemented normal map generation__

[http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/7662/normalmap8yi.png]
{img fileId="15" thumb="y" alt="normalmap8yi.png" rel="box[g]"} 
__Implemented the plane selection using density grid__

I've implemented the plane selection procedure described in [http://www.vrvis.at/TR/2004/TR_VRVis_2004_032_Full.pdf|Image-Based Rendering of Forests]

!!Currently working on
Working on optimizing the selection procedure.