Ampere K. Hardraade wrote:
Finally, there is shadow in FlightGear. =)
Couple of questions:
Do the authors of the aircrafts have to specify the objects that can cast
shadow, or is it all done automatically?
It's automatic. All sub models of the aircraft (the ssg Vtx nodes) are
preprocessed to extract the edges used
by the shadow computation.
<>On aircrafts that have multiple level of details, such as the MD-11,
majority
of the objects are made invisible. If these invisible objects cast
shadow as
well, it might produce huge overhead. Is your code intelligent enough
to leave these invisible objects out of the calculations?
This case is handled, I check the value of the ssgSelector in the object
tree so select and range animations are
correctly rendered.
<>
Unlike other aircrafts where everthing is put into a single mesh file,
the
A380 model is split into multiple files to allow meshes of different
format
to work together. Does shadow work on the A380?
It should be ok if all your files are tied to the aircraft branch in the
scene graph.
<>
Finally, what is the minimal graphic card requirment to be able to see
shadow?
It's hard to say, I just changed my graphic card but with the previous
one - a Ti 4200 - I was not under the impression
that I was fill rate limited. But the cpu has some impact too. There is
a few computation needed to determine what
to draw. The result of this computation is cached and updated when
needed (when the sun moves or when an
animation is doing a rotation for example). At the end it all depends on
the model used, the Concord has like 30.000 polys, the c172p has less
than 2000 polys.
Dave Culp wrote:
Does the canopy frame cast a shadow on the cockpit interior?
Yes ;)
Do transparent surfaces cast shadows?
( I don't mean to be annoying, just curious. This would add a whole new level
of realism to 3D cockpits :)
I didn't do anything special for transparent surface atm. So yes they
cast shadows but I can't tell if this is a good or a bad thing.
Martin Spott wrote:
Do you need _any_ changes to the aircraft models (like Melchior did for
the BO-105) or does it just work right out of the box with the existing
models ?
It's a bit early to reply that question. Perhaps we need to make the
current model shadows conditioned by a
property so that we have either the volumetric shadow or the one from
the model.
Anyway, this looks really great and I think your effort is definitely
worth being added to FG, maybe switched off by default - for users like
me :-) with a property to toggle it on demand ....
Yes of course it will be optional ;)
Harald.
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