In past lives I've approached terrain shading as an imaging problem.
Now I need to get smarter about doing it with polygons. Any
suggestions from the terrain shading community on what is the
preferred geometry (quad vs. triangle) and method of normal generation
(average neighboring surface normals, cross product of neighboring
vertices, etc.) for high visual quality of untextured (and textured)
terrains using what java 3D provides?
I've been doing some experimenting with untextured terrains and my
findings are that flat shading with per-vertex normals is bad -- too
many mis-shaded polygons, whether with quads or tris (why isn't there
an equivalent of normal-per-polygon in Java 3D -- or did I miss
something?), and that gouraud shading produces annoying "starburst"
patterns (perhaps this is just an artifact of gouraud shading in
general).
--jon
> Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 09:24:12 -0400
> From: Pedro Estrada <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Lights on texture
>
> An approach I use (for shaded terrain rendering) is the following:
>
> 1. Set the color of the underlying mesh to Color3f(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f)
> 2. Define a material object :
> material.setAmbientColor(color);
> material.setDiffuseColor(color);
> 3. Set the Gourad shading model in ColoringAttributes
> 4. Set textureAttrib.setTextureMode(TextureAttributes.MODULATE) for the
> texture
>
> This has the effect of modulating the texture with the light shaded polygon
> mesh.
> Works well for terrain as it bypasses having to "burn in" a particular sun
> position (albeit
> at a possible performance penalty).
>
> -Pedro Estrada
> www.alphatech.com
--
__________________ JMB and Associates, Inc. ___________________
Jon Barrilleaux 3800 Lake Shore Ave. Consulting for 3D
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Oakland, CA 94610 Web Applications
510.444.4370 voc & Tech Industry
510.444.0231 fax www.jmbaai.com Management
===========================================================================
To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body
of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
