> How about using plain "old" textured plane crosses for clouds at bigger > distances? (the way trees are done, only with a (or several) horizontal > plane(s) added) > These might work better for bigger structures like cumulonimbus, and > such, > too, as you can "control" the shape a bit. (no fancy shader needed ;) )
I don't think that works. Issue 1: I have never been able to work out a geometry for a static, believable cloud. I have tried plane crosses, intersecting spheres and ellipsoides, stacks of curved sheets, bubble foam geometries,... no joy, all looked quite bad even from some distance. I have tried for a month, no success. However, you are one of the best 3d modellers around here - so maybe you can pull it off. Issue 2: Shading - if faraway clouds are not shaded, they look unrealistic if nearby clouds are shaded away from the sun. If they are shaded, I don't see how the shading of any static geometry will be able to mimick the shading of the rotated sheets - especially plane crosses look very different when shaded. Issue 3: Transitions approaching the cloud: Nearby clouds are created as random stacks of different cloudlets - so there's no way one could know in advance how the detailed version of the cloud will look. Therefore, the faraway proxy and the nearby realistic cloud will almost certainly look differently, and this will give you a rather ugly transition. Issue 4: Transitions leaving the cloud: Nearly as bad - once in the scenery, I make no distinction of what a cloud is, individual textures are on their own - in principle a cloud can partially decay, merge with a different one, merge with a layer, separate itself from a layer,... That goes along with nature where 'cloud' is also not a well-defined object. So in going from a multi-texture stack to a single static model, you'd somehow group clouds again and make a decision which of your textured surfaces are supposed to represented by the placeholder. Consider an undulatus pattern - what is it you'd replace - the whole layer, one strand of clouds, parts of a strand where it is disconnected? How do you group technically - you'd somehow probe the whole geometry and match it to some predefined pattern. You also can't store the info what a cloud is supposed to be at creation time, because clouds are allowed to evolve and to change. So, looking into the details, it's really far from trivial how to use placeholders, and that is why I haven't been able to work out a viable scheme. > I'll have a go at retexturing, redimensioning and choping this weekend if > that's ok with you. Yes, certainly. I suggest that we pack your /Models/Weather/ then into a tarball and I host that for the time being as a dds texture patch to Local Weather so that people can test what works better for them. Once we know how this affects different systems, we can decide what to do and which version should go into GIT. Based on the Electra responses in the forum, dds doesn't seem to run for everyone without problems... * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enable your software for Intel(R) Active Management Technology to meet the growing manageability and security demands of your customers. Businesses are taking advantage of Intel(R) vPro (TM) technology - will your software be a part of the solution? Download the Intel(R) Manageability Checker today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmar _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
