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Procedural snow

An exciting "new" option in FlightGear, that includes reflections, lightmaps, the particle system etc.. A lot is yet to be discovered/implemented!

Re: Procedural snow

Postby Thorsten » Sun Feb 24, 2013 8:53 am

I've been flying up in Greenland over the last days, and I decided what I really need here is some ice. So I used the packice texture to make a shader effect with an adjustable amount of drift ice:

Image

Image

Image

It isn't very sophisticated (has some rough edges, has tiling, isn't very high resolution...) but then again, you don't need it that often. But I don't really know what to do with it - of course it's one more slider to clutter the GUI, and that has drawn some critique already. And of course it is possible to adjust the sliders to get desert sand on the terrain and ice in the water, it's too complicated to run a model to drop implausible conditions.
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby jam007 » Sun Feb 24, 2013 9:58 am

Thorsten wrote in Sun Feb 24, 2013 8:53 am:But I don't really know what to do with it.

Make it read from NSIDC-data :)
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby Thorsten » Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:36 pm

Well, yes, it's less of an issue when using real world data. I hardly ever do that though, so for me the question how to model things offline is more central.
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby Michat » Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:21 pm

Thorsten you are so shy using emoticons, You should at least have used this one 8)

What I understand is that now we have to go to the optician, resulting in that our old 3D glasses must be adapted to solar radiation.

Who says FG is free as Gratis?... my dear I just come back home after buying some beach wear to use in the Hawaii Scenery and now you go poles..... :arrow: :|

What's next?

Hopefully I bought a classic surfboard, if anyone is thinking to place famous maverick winter/tidal wave in front of KHAF.

I don't have a kayak ( to use in walk view), but I have a fishing rod.. gonna put all equipment into my otter haul, nobody knows what can happen.

The more you dig in the past the more the futurist FG is.

Welcome to the ICE Age of FG.

Now I understand why the build server state was frozen for weeks.


FlighGear is a mature, sophisticated, free flight simulador under GPL made by incredible people like you guys.


Congratulations, your experience is our reward.
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby Bjoern » Sun Feb 24, 2013 9:12 pm

Thorsten wrote in Sun Feb 24, 2013 8:53 am:It isn't very sophisticated (has some rough edges, has tiling, isn't very high resolution...) but then again, you don't need it that often. But I don't really know what to do with it - of course it's one more slider to clutter the GUI, and that has drawn some critique already. And of course it is possible to adjust the sliders to get desert sand on the terrain and ice in the water, it's too complicated to run a model to drop implausible conditions.


Add another submenu named "Procedurals"; include sliders or toggles for every procedural shader element or so.


Btw: One more "out of the box" feature not included in other flight simulators. 8)
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby Johan G » Mon Feb 25, 2013 11:15 pm

I understand it is work in progress, but somehow the difference in whiteness of the pack Ice and the snow on land does not look right to me. It's most visible in the first screenshot. Apart from that it looks all good.
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby Thorsten » Tue Feb 26, 2013 8:14 am

I understand it is work in progress, but somehow the difference in whiteness of the pack Ice and the snow on land does not look right to me. It's most visible in the first screenshot.


That's quite true, I've noticed that as well. It's unfortunately not so trivial to correct, because it has to do with lighting rather than texture color. The ice rides as an addon to the water shader, and that doesn't have an ambient/diffuse/specular lighting model but just a specular component - so all the ice can get is what we have. Now, that's somewhat tuned to make water appear nice at sunset/sunrise conditions - but that was never intended to do ice. You see this in the second pic - the color of the ice matches the color of the light reflection on the water, not the color of the light on the terrain.

So the correct solution would be to add an ambient/diffuse/specular lighting model to the water shader - which is a lot of extra performance drain just to match the ice color better :-( I'll probably go for a hack on the texture color hoping to de-emphasize the effect...

It is very annoying how seemingly trivial graphics mismatches sometimes run into stunningly complex issues when you try to fix them.
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby Johan G » Sat Mar 02, 2013 11:41 pm

Thorsten wrote in Tue Feb 26, 2013 8:14 am:...the correct solution would be to add an ambient/diffuse/specular lighting model to the water shader - which is a lot of extra performance drain just to match the ice color better :-(

Ditto the :(
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Re: Procedural snow

Postby chris_blues » Thu Apr 18, 2013 6:34 pm

Michat wrote in Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:21 pm:Welcome to the ICE Age of FG.
Now I understand why the build server state was frozen for weeks..

:lol: :mrgreen:
Don't hesitate to let me know if I'm incorrect or just annoying! As long as you do it gently! :)
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