Volumetric billboards is an image-based representation allowing for the real-time rendering of semi-transparent and visually complex objects arbitrarily distributed in a 3D scene. The representation offers full parallax effect from any viewing direction and improved anti-aliasing of distant objects. It correctly handles transparency between multiple and possibly overlapping objects without requiring any primitive sorting. Furthermore, volumetric billboards can be easily integrated into common rasterization-based renderers, which allows for their concurrent use with polygonal models and standard rendering techniques such as shadow-mapping.

The representation is based on volumetric images of the objects and on a dedicated real-time volume rendering algorithm that takes advantage of the GPU geometry shader. Examples demonstrate the applicability of the method in many cases including levels-of-detail representation for multiple intersecting complex objects, volumetric textures, animated objects and construction of high-resolution objects by assembling instances of low-resolution volumetric billboards.

@article{A-DecNey09,
author = {Philippe Decaudin and Fabrice Neyret},
title = {Volumetric Billboards},
journal = {Comput. Graph. Forum},
volume = 28,
number = {8},
pages = {2079--2089},
keywords = {image-based rendering, billboards, real-time rendering, GPU, geometry shader},
month = dec,
year = 2009
}