How to use 2D cutout and skeleton animation in a 3D scene.

UnknownUser

I'm trying to build a game that uses billboard sprites in a 3D environment. I need to animate the sprites but all I can find is basic frame-flipping animation in AnimatedSprite3D. What I'd really like is to take advantage of the more advanced cutout and polygon deformation 2D animation techniques but I can't find a way to integrate them into the 3D scene. Is there a way to do that? Thanks!

TwistedTwigleg

Welcome to the forums @piotrk!

You can mix 2D and 3D together in Godot. There is a demo on the Godot demo repository that shows how this can be done: 2D in 3D demo

UnknownUser

Thanks! I was thinking along those lines but it looks simpler than I expected. One question, though, is how well would it scale? Hundreds of 2D viewports? Thousands? I assume there's some overhead in running so many separate renders, over and above the implicit overdraw issues.

TwistedTwigleg

Good question! I unfortunately do not know how well it would scale or not. You might be able to bake the animations to textures ahead of time or in a loading screen, which could help improve rendering performance at the cost of memory. You could also have the Viewports render only when they are visible, which could also (potentially) help eek out some more performance.