   Billboarding with particle systems?
  I''ve read the articles on game dev about some of the particle systems and things.. It seems like a lot of them use textured bill boarding? I tried to get this to work my own particle system but kinda had trouble with it.. From what I understand you use the position of the camera to rotate the object so it always is facing the user?I tried looking at the Direct 3D SDK about billboarding but I still feel rather lost. I was wondering if anyone had a better articles to represent this?Currently my 3d world has a camerra that I can move around and stuff and when I tried implementing bilboarding with my particles which are created using a vertex buffer. I ran into a lot of strange issues with the rotations causing strange movement, when the camera moved and stuff.Im not sure if im doing it right? Does anyone have any other good articles on using textured based particle systems with billboarding any help would be great. I''d also like to eventually figure out how to add physics to it so it can look more realistic and stuff.  So if anyone has any help please let me know 
  You''re making it a lot more complicated than it should be.Just get the view transform matrixmake the 41, 42, and 43''th entries of the matrix 0 (xyz)transpose the matrixnow multiply by any other movement and rotation matrices ;  What are the "41, 42, and 43'th entries of the matrix 0 (xyz)?" how do I do that and how do I get the view transform matrix? I know I added in multipicaton into it and it caused my entire particle system to rotate as a whole around the Y axis... :/ How do I transpose the matrix what you mean by that sorry im not that good with directx yet but I have to learn somewhere  [edited by - DevLiquidKnight on February 2, 2004 2:38:40 PM];  there''s a function in the device ( g_device->GetTransform(...) )to get the view matrix and putting into a new one.then YourMatrix._41 = 0.0f;YourMatrix._42 = 0.0f;YourMatrix._43 = 0.0f;these are the xyz locations data for this matrixthis will just ensure that the billboard doesn''t actually move anywhere because of where the camera is.. until you multiply by another matrix.use D3DXMatrixTranspose(...)to transpose the matrix, and put this new matrix into the same one... so it''s all transposed and can now be used for a world matrix.this is now the billboarded matrix, and will always face the camera. It''s not that hard, after you understand you''d be surprised on how so little code and matrix magic can produce this effect. ;  Oh! Cool so u mean I don't have to do some strangely odd rotating in the world matrix! That makes much more sense! I thought it kinda was stupid how I thought it worked.. this gives me a much better idea of what is going on.. thanks !! very much I thought it was much more hard.. this certainly explains it..  ur just like combineing the view matrix or somthing with the world matrix, but only with the particles themselfs!   [edited by - DevLiquidKnight on February 2, 2004 2:55:17 PM];  D3DXMATRIX viewMat;device->GetTransform(D3DTS_VIEW,&viewMat);viewMat._41 <---- does not worknevermind... it does    [edited by - DevLiquidKnight on February 3, 2004 10:57:36 PM]