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To save a national park...

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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Sat Sep 29, 2012 7:42 am

I figured for the particles you should use...
<emissive>false</emissive>
<lighting>true</lighting>
to get the lighting right.


Yep, that's what I use, which is why the water becomes grey rather than white in the morning. I guess part of the problem is that all the other light computations in the scene are done by the terrain shaders, whereas the particle system doesn't know what light the terrain shaders assign to the scene. So maybe making them emissive tied to a property is actually a better idea...

I was asking why would you do the dot(faceNormal, upVector), since that is most likely to be equal to faceNormal.z (if my math is still right)?


Depends on what the coordinate system is at the point you evaluate this - if the up vector is indeed (0,0,1) then you're right, if we are still in some global coordinate system where (0,0,1) points to the North Pole then it doesn't work.

Thorsten - you can probably suggest an algorithm off the top of your head


I define the dot of normal and up as 'steepness' and then do a smoothstep in the steepness to determine the bias factor for vegetation in the shaders. I would simply try a few locations to see what looks good - or maybe even give us some property control over the limits, because it actually depends on the vegetation belt you're in - tropical vegetation is quite a bit more clinging to steep slopes than arctic vegetation...

IMHO, I don't think Yosemite falls should die halfway down


On most pictures it appears to do pretty much that. But there's also a technical issue: Particles don't 'flow' over terrain when they hit it, they just pass through. So even if the real waterfall is not free-fall but in contact with the rockface, we can't really simulate that unless the rock face is actually vertical, we can only do free-fall. But again, in Flightgear the rock faces are usually a bit less steep than in reality. So to make this work, the waterfall has to actually start with a high horizontal velocity to be thrown out far enough such that it doesn't disappear immediately beneath the terrain. Which is a bit of a limit determining how far down we can make it fall. Adding a second particle source underneath for a multiple overlapping cascade effects seems to be tricky (I got some texturing artefacts), so... without burning excessive resources for the waterfall, which in the whole scheme is just some addition to the scene, this is probably as good as it gets (if I were willing to burn excessive resources, there's Nasal and shader magic, but I'm not sure I want to develop a hi-fidelity waterfall simulator with the option to see this from an airplane :) )
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby statto » Sat Sep 29, 2012 8:20 pm

There are underlying landclass shapefiles for Yosemite created but not turned into scenery yet. If you want to compile those I can give them to you.

Same goes for all of California and other parts of the west - western Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Las Vegas...
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby El Flauta » Sun Sep 30, 2012 4:16 am

Image



Fantastic work!!!


Did you consider places like Atacama desert?
Look this...
and this...
...and look that airport!

The most dry place on Earth looks like a humid forrest in FG...
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Sun Sep 30, 2012 1:54 pm

There are underlying landclass shapefiles for Yosemite created but not turned into scenery yet. If you want to compile those I can give them to you.


Doesn't really help, since models submitted to the scenery database need to be placed in default scenery. Besides, I don't really want to add my own patches of custom scenery, I want to test and refine the set of tools we have to make scenery better with minimum effort. Waterfalls are sort of a detour, but for instance we tagged the placement of trees on slopes as something to improve, and again that'll help everywhere.

I have a dust effect in the shaders for dryer regions, I now also have a moss/lichen/green stuff effect for very wet regions, so combined with the regionalizing and the three texture overlay procedural texturing, that's a very impressive toolkit to change the appearance of the scenery with just a few edits or even runtime with a slider.

Elevation bugs we can't really deal with that way, but a lot of other landclass assignment problems we can nowadays 8)

Did you consider places like Atacama desert? (...)The most dry place on Earth looks like a humid forrest in FG.


Probably not really classified and hence ended up as 'Landmass' landcover class - which ends up being mapped to forest. Should be easy to fix - we just reassign 'Landmass' in the region and use a good amount of dust shader effect.

I'll offer you a deal - you get me nice and GPL-compatible sand textures as seen in the first picture you linked, and I'll do the regional/procedural texturing definitions.
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Sun Sep 30, 2012 4:05 pm

Impressions from three different flights through the park - looks as spectacular now as it should 8)

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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Johan G » Sun Sep 30, 2012 5:44 pm

Amazing screenshots, Thorsten. 8)

Starting to look like the pictures of the area on Wikimedia Commons.

And, eh, look out for dinosaurs on that mesa... :wink: :lol:
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby El Flauta » Sun Sep 30, 2012 6:11 pm

Now we only just need a house attached to a pile of balloons to fly though the park... :roll:
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby LesterBoffo » Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:48 pm

I liked that film..
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby wlbragg » Thu Oct 04, 2012 3:26 am

In order to use the procedural texturing, you need a recent GIT, this didn't make it into 2.8


Can you clarify this for me?

What part of the code are you referring to? Is it this?

<texture-set>
<texture>Terrain/rainforest-hawaii.png</texture>
<texture n="11">Terrain/rainforest-hawaii.png</texture>
<texture n="12">Terrain/dirtrock.png</texture>
</texture-set>


You can't do this until 2.9?
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Thu Oct 04, 2012 7:57 am

You can't do this until 2.9?


You can, I don't think it's an illegal statement as such, just the shader to process the information is not yet in 2.8, so you won't see any effect in 2.8.
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Thu Oct 11, 2012 7:24 am

Thanks to Stuart, no more trees on steep slopes :-) Here's Yosemite Valley as it looks now:

Image
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Philosopher » Thu Oct 11, 2012 2:08 pm

Wow, that's looking niiiiice!
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Johan G » Fri Oct 12, 2012 8:30 am

Indeed it is. :D
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Mon Oct 15, 2012 1:30 pm

Did you consider places like Atacama desert?


A simple matter of unclassified terrain it seems... unclassified terrain is always mapped to forest, so we just need to remap this to something dry - took me just 10 minutes to fix.

Do you want to see this?

Image
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Insert

Code: Select all
<!-- Atacama desert -->

<material>
  <condition>
   <and>
   <equals>
    <property>sim/startup/season</property>
    <value>summer</value>
   </equals>
    <and>
     <greater-than>
      <property>position/longitude-deg</property>
      <value>-80.0</value>
     </greater-than>
     <less-than>
      <property>position/longitude-deg</property>
      <value>-65.0</value>
     </less-than>
     <greater-than>
      <property>position/latitude-deg</property>
      <value>-30.0</value>
     </greater-than>
     <less-than>
      <property>position/latitude-deg</property>
      <value>-15.0</value>
     </less-than>
    </and>
   </and>
  </condition>
  <name>Landmass</name>
  <name>SomeSort</name>
  <name>Island</name>
  <name>Default</name>
  <effect>Effects/landmass-nowood</effect>
  <texture-set>
   <texture>Terrain/sand5.png</texture>
   <texture n="11">Terrain/sand_hires.png</texture>
   <texture n="12">Terrain/dirtrock.png</texture>
  </texture-set>
  <xsize>2000</xsize>
  <ysize>2000</ysize>
  <light-coverage>10000000.0</light-coverage>
  <wood-coverage>4000000.0</wood-coverage>
  <tree-texture>Trees/mixed-shrub.png</tree-texture>
  <tree-varieties>8</tree-varieties>
  <tree-range-m alias="/params/forest/tree-range-m"/>
  <tree-height-m>25.0</tree-height-m>
  <tree-width-m>15.0</tree-width-m>
  <rolling-friction>1</rolling-friction>
  <bumpiness>1</bumpiness>
</material>


into your materals file (and crank up dust effect slider a bit...).

In reality, we'd probably like more reddish sand and rock, but for that I'd need to create new textures.
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby sa7k » Mon Oct 15, 2012 4:52 pm

I encourage everyone to try local settings, it's not that hard. You can also change the amount of random buildings.
Image
With some shared buildings it could look quite realistic for my region.
Image
I copied the settings from the tropical South America zone, with the coordinates in a separate file. Is that preferred? There are some coordinates in the main file too. Thanks for this Thorsten and Stuart, and everyone else.
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