The Compositor

[slawekmikula]

Impressive. Especially the last screen.

[icecode]

More testing with the F-14, this time clustered shading lights:







I'll write a small section on the wiki article detailing how to add support for these lights in aircrafts. The light definition is very similar to Rembrandt's (almost the same), so I'll also provide a small script so people who already ported their aircraft to Rembrandt don't even have to bother reimplementing them.

[legoboyvdlp]

Could you make the lights directional? The F-14's lights are embedded in the wing as such:



So, the lights wouldn't really illuminate the wing at all.

[icecode]

I'm not an aircraft developer, I just changed the F-14 light definitions to use the Compositor's lights instead of Rembrandt's. I guess you could change the light type to be a spotlight instead. I don't intend to commit this anyway, it's just that the F-14 is a good aircraft to test stuff on.

[wkitty42]

how do we fix this? i'm starting FG with --compositor=Compositor/ALS/als... i think i see this also without the --compositor option...

Code: Select all

  121.83 [ALRT]:input      can't find "Compositor/Effects/light-spot.eff"
  121.83 [ALRT]:input      can't find base effect Effects/light-spot


[icecode]

That's just FG complaining about the Rembrandt lights being missing, but it's not a problem, everything should load up just fine. If you still want to get rid of the spam, just create two files in "$FG_ROOT/Compositor/Effects" called light-spot.eff and light-point.eff with the following contents:

light-spot.eff

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PropertyList>
  <name>Effects/light-spot</name>
</PropertyList>


light-point.eff

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PropertyList>
  <name>Effects/light-point</name>
</PropertyList>

[wkitty42]

thanks! i guess i haven't seen that before because i mainly only use ALS

can you say if the infrared and night vision options in normal ALS also work in Compositor/ALS/als mode? they're the experimental button in the rendering dialog in-sim... i use infrared a lot when flying at night... i can understand if they're not yet ported to the compositor...

also, where do you prefer to get questions and bug reports? here, mailing list, somewhere else?

[icecode]

can you say if the infrared and night vision options in normal ALS also work in Compositor/ALS/als mode? they're the experimental button in the rendering dialog in-sim... i use infrared a lot when flying at night... i can understand if they're not yet ported to the compositor...

They should work the same way as before already.

also, where do you prefer to get questions and bug reports? here, mailing list, somewhere else?

Wherever you prefer, I read all of them. I'll try to collect most questions and their answers in the wiki article as I'd like to keep it as the central resource for anything related to the Compositor. Everyone is welcome to contribute with their findings.

[Richard]

Could you make the lights directional? The F-14's lights are embedded in the wing as such:

So, the lights wouldn't really illuminate the wing at all.

That's how the model has always had the illuminating lights - so it's something that I need to fix.

[Richard]

More testing with the F-14, this time clustered shading lights:

I'll write a small section on the wiki article detailing how to add support for these lights in aircrafts. The light definition is very similar to Rembrandt's (almost the same), so I'll also provide a small script so people who already ported their aircraft to Rembrandt don't even have to bother reimplementing them.

That is fantastic progress and looks great. Thanks for you hard work getting this far with the Compositor.

[Gijs]

Awesome work! Looking forward to try this on my aircraft
Thanks to your accompanying documentation, that should be no problem.

EDIT: Actually I do have a question/request. Is it possible to have elliptical spot lights? The 744's anti collision lights in the wingtips for example produce a light beam that covers 70 degree vertical angle and 140 degree horizontal angle...

[icecode]

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

EDIT: Actually I do have a question/request. Is it possible to have elliptical spot lights? The 744's anti collision lights in the wingtips for example produce a light beam that covers 70 degree vertical angle and 140 degree horizontal angle...

Hmm, interesting. I tried to adhere as much as I could to the default OpenGL fixed pipeline definition for lights, which only defines a single cutoff angle, so it can only produce cones with circular bases. The light culling code also assumes they have circular bases (which simplifies the culling a lot). I can't think of any way to support this without excesively complicating culling, but I'll add it to the wiki anyway.

[Thorsten]

Can't we have a circular cross section of the bounding volume but make the light profile inside non-circular? Solving an elliptical intensity profile inside the shader is near-trivial.

[icecode]

That sounds good, yeah, no need to complicate anything if we just assume it is circular for culling purposes. What extra parameters would the shader need to solve the elliptical intensity?

[Thorsten]

A vec3 perpendicular to the axis to indicate both direction and relative amplitude of the shorter elongation would probably do nicely...