On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote: > Downstream, to preserve the illusion of shadows, I've had to alter the tree > shader to purely ambient lighting based on sun angle above the horizon. But > that seems to be a good idea in general - not only is this cheapter to > compute, but also our tree sprites have flat suraces with a clear normal, so > they have very pronounced directional scattering - real trees have random > orientation of leaves and needles and a leaf can also transmit light, so I > think real trees have much weaker directional light scattering and isotropic > scattering is actually the better approximation.
No objection from me. I've never been particularly happy with the directional scatter on the trees, but haven't spent any time trying to fix it. On a related note, the thread highlights that our tree textures are rather small, so our trees look quite blocky. When I initially implemented them, I think I just used the same texture sizes as the existing tree models, so the trees are only 128 pixels tall in a 512x128 "strip". As it happens, I'm part way through a change that would allow varying snow- and leaf- cover without having to load different textures, so trees above the snowline could be snow covered while those below are not. This will increase the size of the textures to 512x512, while an individual tree will remain on 128 pixels tall. Given that we've got a very limited number of tree textures and the same texture is used on a large number of objects, perhaps it would be worthwhile increasing the resolution? -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
