Over the past week or two, I’ve been building an asset library for generating our abandoned city ruins. One important part of this library are the low rez 2D ruin assets. It’s very important that we can render these complicated environments quickly. Essentially, this test was using a few hundred ‘billboard’ polys mapped with 2D textures. These will render fast, and keep the scene files pretty lightweight. The question was how well these 2D cards would hold up for environments.

I replicated several different sets of the billboard assets and generated a full 360º ring that all point towards world origin, which is where the action will be taking place. These frames render in about 20 seconds each, and only use about 400 instanced polygons. Considering they will only be used for distant backgrounds, I’m pretty happy with the result so far.