Flipbook

When building large game worlds for low-end devices, using billboards to represent distant objects is often essential. This is where Simplygon’s Flipbook feature comes in handy.

A flipbook is essentially an atlas composed of multiple impostors from a single view, capturing the asset from different angles in a 360-degree rotation around the object. This technique allows the representation of any asset, no matter how complex using just one billboard plane with a single material. Flipbooks are perfect for optimizing distant assets viewable from multiple directions, especially when constrained by triangle count.

To render flipbooks effectively, a custom shader is needed to select the appropriate tile in the atlas. The Unreal Engine Plugin includes such a shader, and for other engines, a similar shader must be created.

The number of viewing directions in your flipbook is adjustable, allowing you to balance viewing angle accuracy with texture size requirements. Materials are cast from the original asset to the flipbook texture atlas, ensuring visual consistency.

Flipbooks integrate well with other Simplygon features and can be used in automated pipelines to:

• Optimize vegetation using a Level of Detail (LOD) chain, starting with triangle reduction for initial LODs and then using flipbook for the more distant LODs.
• Employ compute casters for assets rendered with custom shaders.

Simplygon has been helping optimize games for over 16 years, supporting everything from high-end consoles to low-end mobile devices. With Simplygon, you can ship games across multiple platforms without the need to manually optimize all your assets for each platform.

If you want to evaluate how Simplygon can be used to optimize your game, contact us for an evaluation.