Could someone explain to me what each of the options for face orientation means?
I see:
Normal
Shadow
Halo
Billboard
I have played around with them, and I get the general gist; they change the orientation of faces the material is applied to in some way during gameplay. I am not really familiar however with what the intended effect of each is individually. Normal is obvious (the faces are oriented in the direction of their normals), but the difference between halo and billboard is not obvious, and I am not noticing any difference between Normal and Shadow either.
Halo: Mostly used for flare, smoke, dust, explosions or fire effects. The faces are oriented ALWAYS to the camera on the X axis. People mostly use one face while using this mode.
Shadow: It’s name says much. It is used as a “shadow”, wich means that the faces will be located always on the closest object downwards (On the -Z axis.).
Billboard: It’s kinda like the Halo. It is mostly used for grass, fire, leaves and other stuff. It means that the faces will always face the camera on the X axis, but keeping it’s Y orientation.
Whoa, I didn’t know about the shadow orientation mode! Is that new or something? I’m going to try that.
Anyway, Halo turns the faces to always face the camera, Billboard turns them around the z-axis to face the camera, but only around the z-axis(meaning it will not turn up or down).
Note that for these modes to work properly, all faces of the mesh must be pointing along the positive x-axis (In mesh space space! The face orientation settings discard any rotation of the object itself, so you must make sure the object’s rotation is (0,0,0), and go into edit mode and turn the faces yourself)
Ah ok. So shadow depends on other geometry (i tested it just floating out in an empty scene), and the difference between billboard and halo is that billboard does not rotate with the camera around the y axis.
@laser blaster: Yeah I think this was part of why I was so confused about the differences between them, the planar mesh I was testing them out on was not facing down the mesh-space x axis, and I had shading turned off, so I was getting a sense that they were skewing the geometry somehow.
Good to know. Yeah I am trying to get the geometry of the bullets in a gun thing down to single triangles. Thanks for the replies.