Day 39: For Instance,

Today was a busy (and hungry) day. Mainly got preparations in for the build for tomorrow, including pushing  my computer to the limit for lighting builds.

What's the big part of today? Instanced drawing! Imagine that we have a single buffer for vertices, but we don't want to have 500 instances of that buffer. Instead, we can have an instance buffer that uses the same vertex buffer across different variations in position, scale, etc.

This example worked with position:

What's this? The positions aren't right? Nor are the rotations? Egads! Each position will have to have a specific calculation! Looks as if I'll have to do the billboard rotation calculation in the GPU.