There’s a new free billboard import script for DAZ Studio users, Load Image as Plane. This automatically imports your image and places it on a correctly sized 2D billboard. (Doing it the old way was a bit complicated and fiddly).
I couldn’t quickly find a good picture to illustrate them in DAZ, but here’s an indicative visual from SketchUp. They look much the same in DAZ…
As you can see here, you need to ensure a clean cut-out, and that you don’t have a colour fringe lingering around the edges of your cutout.
I see that the DAZ Store also has the Billboard Plugin currently on sale at $10. This has your billboards “always align to the user. Works automatically with all cameras”. In other words, your billboards will always face the camera.
Since billboards are flat 2D and are ready-rendered, they can speed up scenes. They’re also known as “2D cutouts”, “alpha planes”, “faceme elements”, “camera-facing planes”, and as “fog planes” when their picture is of semi-transparent fog. Commonly used for render-time hogs such as trees or waves, to have big crowds in the back of your scene, for fog and mist, or FX such as lightning bolts.
They tend not to play nicely with Preview (OpenGL) mode, as I seem to recall that the box around the element is usually shown. But Poser Comic-book Preview users might experiment there, re: pre-tooned hair as a 2D plane.