Possible to have an object facing always the camera?

[Sam Karli]

Hi,
is it possible to construct an object that _always_ faces the camera?
I'm thinking about a billboard-like tree, that aways can be seen perpendicular to the camera axis and never can be seen being shortened.

It's possible to get the camera's position through the GLOB_EYEPOS_X and GLOB_EYEPOS_Y variables but are such variables there for the gdl object? (I haven't found such one.)

[Karl Ottenstein]

The 2D billboard trees and people in the library have always done this... at least since version 6.5 when I began using ARCHICAD.

For example, Deciduous Trees 20 lets you select a variety of tree image or outline billboards. In 3D - and only in perspective view, not axo view - doing a rebuild/regenerate rotates the tree to face the camera.

The library part above also lets you load your own custom picture as the billboard under the '2D Representation...' and '3D Representation" settings groups.

You can open any of these billboard parts to view the code that does the rotation.

[Sam Karli]

Indeed the script is run - sometimes.

But it's not regenerated always, so, when i switch to a 3d view or even if i render it, it points to a wrong direction (the same holds for trees also, interestingly).

Thanks

[alemanda]

I have the same problem ... it's not enoough to regenerate the 3D window ... everytime I have to select all the billboards (trees, people, etc), open the settings and click ok (without changing anything) ... Only in this way I get them to regenerate and face correctly the camera...
And this happens since many versions ...

[alemanda]

How to solve?
Is it a bug?

[Anonymous]

Any news on this matter? it would be great to have this working just like on other softwares like sketchup.