Reducing draw calls for sprites in a 3D scene

[Leonidas]

With hardware instancing you can have unique position, rotation and scale per instance just by filling the array buffer showed in the example.

There is also space for a 4th attribute without adding a new vertex buffer, but still you will need to write a custom shader to use that (e.g. for diffuse color). If you are determined to have more attributes, that’s doable with a custom vertex buffer.

Here is a related post about custom colors per instance using HW instancing:

Hardware instancing and color

Hi, I’m building a football stadium with thousands of moving plane primitives in the stands, that comprise a card stunt system. Each one will be coloured with a single colour, and will basically act like a pixel in an image, and when assembled together, they’ll recreate that image. I also want to be able to change the image, so in a “wave”, cards will gradually flip around and change to a new colour to reveal a new image within a second or two. I’m using hardware instancing, as explained here:…