Dave,

Some random notes, which may or may not help!

I would first experiment with setting the clip to > 20K. You may get
Z-buffer problems but you loose precision at the back of the Z-buffer first
so this may not be noticeable for a while anyway.

http://www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s=1475&a=20706,00.asp

With nVidia using a 32 bit Z-buffer you may well be able to push it out to
the limits you need, depending on how much resolution you need at the front
of the buffer. Any data?

The alternative is probably to set clip to 10K-50K (or whatever) and render
to an off-screen, which you can then apply to your sky-box, plane or dome.
You'll pay the price in programming complexity however and I'd guess you'll
need to fog pretty aggressively anyway to pull this off. If you have level
transitions perhaps this will be feasible or you can pre-compute.

Let me know what you discover -- sounds like useful stuff.

Sincerely,

Daniel Selman

Author - "Java 3D Programming"
http://www.manning.com/selman



-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for Java 3D API
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of David Yazel
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2002 3:24 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Rendering terrain beyong clip range


I have been trying to find out how to render 20+ KM of terrain without
having the clip set to > 20K.  I don't think there is any way to render
geometry farther than the clip.  The Clip node overrides the view's clip,
but does so for all geometry in view.  The ModelClip leaf is still bounded
by the view's clip.

Our terrain uses an adaptive quadtree and it can easily render nice geometry
for miles.  One thing I thought about was forcing the further away (and
bigger) patches to render before the closer patches.  Then disable zbuffer
and scale them so that they are within the clip range.  Then subsequent
geoemtry would draw over it where appropriate.  I have not been able to get
this to work since scaling always pulls stuff towords the origin, which is
not right.  The next thought is to render the far off mountains to an
offscreen canvas and produce 4 textures which could placed as billboards
surrounding the view.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

Thanks,

Dave Yazel

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