Billboards pretty much are alpha planes, except that it looks like they've made them so billboards always face the camera, whereas alpha planes have to be manually placed/animated to do so.

Also, on the whole ecosystem thingy and billions of polygons, Eon has an animation on their website that says it was created and rendered on a 512mb system, so in theory Eon is saying you don't need to upgrade your system at all for ecoystem to be used. I'm still curious as to how they can possibly make the memory management of those particular material/objects so efficient that the polygon count would be irrelevent for those objects (as that is how they make it sound).

I'm Still really really excited to get it though, I can think of a billion things to do with that tool that have just been a pain to do (or downright impossible) in any of the existing versions. It's times like these I really hate having a house to pay bills for :)

Message edited on: 02/01/2005 10:56