   Rpg Battle System
  Hey, I am working on a 2d rpg. Currently, im using directx9, and everything with the tile engine is far enough to where i can start working on the battle system. For the battle system, I want to do a side view 3d billboarded type thing(imagine ff6 view, but billboarded 3d with depth) Now my question is, how do you switch between 2d and 3d like this. Ive never done anything like this, and the only way I can think of how to do this would be very slow. Any ideas?   
  I did something like this in the pastmaybe it won't help, since it seems you've worked quite a bit on your project...but here's how I did itthe 2D portions was really 3D simulating 2D - I just had plane shapes on which I drew the imagesand all the shapes were aligned on the same plane, so it did look 2Dwhen I needed 3D I didn't have to switch anything because everything was already 3DI don't know about directx, if there's a better way to to it though   ;  If you are using DirectX for 2d I am assuming you are going either one of two routes:1. You are using pretransformed verticesIn this case all you have to do is set up your 3D projection when the game enters a battle, and then use untransformed vertices to do the 3d rendering.  Look up the D3DX matrix operations for some help.  If your camera doesn't move, billboarding is easy, just render planes aligned to the X-Y plane and you are done.2. You are using an orthographic projectionThis is the same as the above for the most part, all you have to do is  change your projection matrix to enter 3D.   