# Imposters

Billboards or point sprites are quite often used as "imposters" pretending to be a 3D geometry by showing a 2D image that is always facing the camera.   
[Candera](http://dev.doc.cgistudio.at/APILINK/namespace_candera.html "[DataBinding_RefTypeSample]") supports both, Billboards and Point Sprites to achieve three-dimensional impressions by showing camera aligned two-dimensional images.

In order to relief distinction between Billboards and Point Sprites see following comparison:

<div class="contents" id="bkmrk-billboards-support-r"><div class="contents"><div class="textblock">- Billboards support rectangular dimension and non-uniform scale.
- Billboards support different rotation techniques (see Alignment), whereas Point Sprites are always screen aligned.
- Point Sprites have a performance advantage due to less geometry (one instead of 4 vertices).

</div></div></div>Overall recommendation: Use Point Sprites for spherical shapes like particles, lens flares, sparkles, dust which are screen aligned. \\ Further, use Billboards for world up oriented clouds, text, or yaw axis aligned trees, and signs, etc.