Imported Openflight Billboards - Function in 3D Studio Max?

[Anonymous]

Hi all.  First post.  I'm looking at importing a longstanding database of .flt openflight files into 3D Studio Max and I'm trying to understand if the billboard functionality remains intact in 3D Studio.  Using Flight Studio I see that the billboard retains it's attributes of rotating around vertical axis but will all imported billboards retain functionality of facing a camera when rendering an image or video?  Does the camera need to be given an attribute so that all these imported .flt billboards will function correctly or does this not work without manual modification to each plane or external reference billboard imported?  I've researched the Look at Object as it relates to particles but this is a different thing I believe??

Thanks.  

Dave

[Anonymous]

Hi, i don't know Flight Studio, but in 3ds Max, you can select all of your billboards, apply an orientation constraint and select the camera. Now if you move the camera, you will see all planes move to face this camera.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply Eric.  I'll look at this but you indicate selecting all billboards and applying a constraint.  This is the problem for me.  I have an openflight database which probably contains tens of thousands of billboards as external references (trees and street culture).  Selecting them all for each camera I would want to render from is unrealistic/impossible.  I'm wondering if there is any way of setting some camera attribute that will make all existing imported openflight billboards/those existing attributes perform as they would in an environment with an openflight loader?

Thanks to any all with a much better 3D Max skillset/knowledge than I.

Dave