I’m using billboards, and they have been perfect for marking places on the globe. The only problem I’m having comes from the polylines I’m drawing near the same space. When the camera is pointed to align with the billboard and the access, the billboard’s position has sufficient altitude that none of the lower geometry intersects it. If the user rotates the globs, the billboard (which is rather large, maybe 200x200) will intersect the polylines.
To solve this I would like to anchor the angle at which the billboard points to the same vector it started at. From reading other posts in the forum it appears to not be possible, possibly because there are optimizations to billboard that allow them to render more efficiently because it doesn’t need a real geometry. I’m only going to show between 0 and 3 of these at a time, so a small performance hit for the geometry isn’t a problem. I’m trying to avoid using a RectanglePrimitive or Polygon because getting the coordinates right to correct for the distortion at the poles was proving difficult and I also have to solve the texture rotation
Increasing the distance to the surface of the earth doesn’t correct the problem because instead of overlapping, it is now so far away from the location the billboard is attempting to reference that it is difficult to tell where it points. If billboards can’t accomplish this, I know this post mentions using a model for billboard purposes, as it sounds like the model would at least have geometry. I suppose I could then produce a rectangle, but I would still need to wrap a dynamic texture around it. Is that the best way to achieve this, or am I missing something?