Well I want the sun glare to be potentially occluded by everything in our
scene.  So if a small sign post occludes the sun, I want it to affect it.
In a driving simulation the one frame delay will not be noticeable
guaranteed.  At least when talking about scaling a lens flare.  

It sounds to me like you guys think occlusion querying the whole database
for the sun would be taxing?  Maybe I should go back to querying the depth
buffer then?


Zach

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Maslowski
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 11:13
To: 'osg users'
Subject: RE: [osg-users] Sun occlusion

Hi Robert,
  It worked fairly well for me in both contexts, although my application was
pretty special-purpose (FPS). For effects, the objects pixel coverage was
simply used as a factor for the intensity of the effect. For culling, it was
far more complex. As you said, the results have to be treated far more
conservatively. So, anything occupying ~5 pixels would be considered
visible. If an object was moving extremely fast, I would always draw it. If
the frame rate was very low, I would be more conservative in my pixel
coverage. 

  One thing worth mentioning is that I automatically picked occluders when
sorting my objects (size, distance to camera, material settings), and rarely
ever used an objects full representation when doing occlusion queries. When
exporting objects from the art package, the artist could define an internal
bounding sphere, box, or hull which could be used for occlusion tests. These
simplified objects were used for the queries since they could be rendered in
no time, but still gave useable results.  

It's been about four years since I worked with that code, and quite a few
things have changed in respect to working with the GPU, but it proved to be
a useful approach at the time. Unfortunately, I never used a traditional,
CPU based occlusion system in the same code base, so I don't have numbers to
compare. All I remember is that it certainly worked in our favor since the
CPU was already overloaded with AI and physics work.

This whole approach was grabbed from an article released by NVIDIA for the
Game Developers Conference (2001...I think). 

E. 

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Osfield
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 10:22
To: osg users
Subject: Re: [osg-users] Sun occlusion

HI Eric,

On 12/12/06, Eric Maslowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This really isn't noticeable unless you have very fast objects, or 
> very
low
> frame rates (sub-20fps). As long as you intelligently choose your
occluders
> and conduct some simple tests to identify the above, there shouldn't 
> be
any
> problems.

In what context, culling or special effects?

Culling has to be conservative otherwise objects get culled that shouldn't
be.  If you are having to be overly conservative then you are also not
getting the most of the potential culling.  One has to be very careful about
making sure the benefits you gain outweigh the costs involved, if you are
loosing efficiency of culling then the cost benefits shift against you.
Personally I'm pretty skeptical about using occlusion querry for culling in
anything other than quite specific apps.

For special effects things are much less critical.  For special effects like
lens flare one has to use almost the whole scene as occluders, with lens
affect as post process.

Robert.
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