Atmospheric scattering, with terrain shader preview

[Zan]

UPDATE 06.10.2011: Thorsten kindly wrote a document about light propagation in optically tick medium, see it here: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/files/light_optically_thick.pdf

UPDATE 03.05.2011: Terrain shader preview: http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=11274&start=30#p123287

UPDATE 14.03.2011: Links to patches and shaders: http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=11274&p=117965#p117965

Hi all.

I've been doing an atmospheric scattering shader for few weeks now, mostly after Gpu Gems article, http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter16.html. I've modeled all those equations with python and found similar functions as O'Neil to make the shader runtime.

Some screenshots:
Skydome shader starting to work:


Skydome and ground shaders working, altitude is about 30km.


Same as above, but this time at around 250km.


I did this in a shader developing program, so it's not yet suitable for FG. It also is currently too slow as all calculations are done in fragment shader, but I might get it to work with FG in few weeks

Zan

[ASTON]

Fantastic!
Keep going!

[Gijs]

One of my FlightGear dreams slowly becomes reality!
Looking forward to the day it does, Zan!

[ot-666]

Really nice A long missed feature.
Thanks for all the work.

[fredb]

Hi Zan,

If you look at my videos (link in sig), you'll find that my terrain engine experiment used two forms of atmospheric scattering. The oldest used O'Neil's and the more recent use Bruneton's algorithm. I found O'Neil's frustrating because his equations seemed to come from nowhere and the air "thickness" was not easily adjustable. Bruneton's is a bit better but requires more processing power and has a round earth model, which is wrong as every one know. O'Neil's should also use a spherical model.

[ASTON]

Heya Fredb, your atmospheric scattering's incredibly stunning!
Does the code is avalaible for mac user or is it only your own beta ? Will it be included in the 2.2 release?
thanks

[kyokoyama]

Finally, a way to fly realistically in space (maybe)!
...how'd you do this?

[Zan]

Today I managed to hack the code so that skydome accepts an effect too, and ported my shader.

Here are some sneak peeks:




As can be seen, one problem is that terrain is not rendered properly from high altitudes (too few tiles). Other than that, only needs some parameter tweaking to make it look better

Oh, and this breaks the non-shader implementation. I must fix that too.

Fredb: I have to Bruneton's paper an I think I'm going to implement that after I get the O'Neil's algorithm to work. I must do some hacks to get everything to work properly as FG uses so many different coordinate systems I indeed think that Bruneton's algorithm is more sophisticated

[kyokoyama]

That's amazing!
Now there just has to be a way to have something to take the place of the unmodeled tiles, and FG will have a complete Earth!

[ot-666]

wow
the first one is stunning...

[redneck]

Agreed. If curt would make a changelog for each developer snapshot, I'd be sure to grab the next one that has this feature.

[planetacancun]

Wow! great job! Eyes watching you man!

Zan! take a look at my Motion blur post later when you finish this ok??? Pretty please???

[Zan]

From what I can tell, it would involve making the "Geode" in "SGSkyDome::build" into an "EffectGeode" instead and calling "makeEffect" on some sort of read properties.

Sure, I changed dome.cxx so that Geode is EffectGeode like you already knew, and then

Code: Select all

Effect *effect = makeEffect("Effects/skydome", true);
if(effect)
    geode->setEffect(effect);


It's basically that simple No need to hassle with properties or anything, just give the effect name. Then you need to create the file "Effects/skydome.eff" in FG data directory and create shaders and whatever you need.

Tweaked the parameters a bit:



I'm trying to get the non shader version to work now, maybe then this could be pushed to git.
- Zan

[HHS]

Looks great!

I wonder if it looks still great with some fog and we will still have the stars. They would like look much better with the new sky!
Would it be possible to have also a sun/ lens flare effect??

[fredb]

With atmospheric Scattering, you have to modify all material shaders to compute fog, or air thickness, accurately.
At least you need the horizon match the skydome. Changing the skydome only is pointless IMO.