Making billboard type objects look right in a walk through

[Daniel Lindahl]

Hi,

In my latest revisions of a current project design I swapped out the 'Palm Tree Model 20' object for the more natural looking "billboard style" 'Palm Trees 20' object.

My first question is: is it possible to show this in the elevation views, instead of just seeing the blank billboard rectangle?

The second question relates to walk throughs: the Billboard tree shows OK in open GDL and the 3D BIMx view, but it is always oriented towards the starting point of that view only, so eventually as you walk around the model you see it edge on. I thought it was supposed to always face you as you move around it in the model. To remedy this I tried placing 2 instances of it in the same place, rotated at 90 degrees to each other, but of course this didn't work either, as both objects automatically realigned to face the starting point of the walk through!
I think there should be a parameter in the out-of-the-box billboard objects to disable the "face-the-viewer" function so this could be achieved for a better walk through experience (placing an X of 2 billboards).
Incidentally, there seems to be a problem with the alpha-channel of this object, it is not totally transparent, you see a slight darkening of the sky/background to the extent of the billboard rectangle. Not sure if that is true of all billboards, I haven't tried the others.

I will try to tweak the object myself to incorporate this option (to not align with the viewer position) but don't like my chances, as it calls plant macros from the AC library and I don't think a revised object in my own library would find those macros.

Any thoughts on getting better looking elevations and BIMx walk-throughs?

[SenecaDesignLLC]

You will not get the disired results with the gdl and bimx. I use some aftermarket trees I purchased, and heavily use the archibam trees from the garden works library

[Anonymous]

I am trying to get trees to display as either outline or transparent in elevation - the transparency option that was available in ArchiCAD 18 seems to be missing in ArchiCAD 22. Thoughts on other ways to achieve this effect?