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Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Hooray » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:25 pm

@vitos: for a change, I'll try to resort to ignoring ignorance for the sake of not wasting too much time having endless debates here... the limitations you mention are kinda moot however, because you could just as well suggest that we don't only need to wait for FG to evolve much more, but even the whole internet itself - given that latency times of ~10-50 msecs are fairly common in most multiplayer "games" you can play online these days.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby vitos » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:30 pm

I know what to do but I would not tell You. If You are smart then You'll find only one realistic solution by Yourself.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Thorsten » Tue Apr 22, 2014 7:41 am

I've tinkered again with this idea - now the planet shader fogs the earthsphere based on the current lower atmosphere visibility, does more faithful specular reflections, and I'm in the process of rigging GPL compatible textures directly from NASA Pale Blue Marble, so we might perhaps ship this with the next release.

Image

Image

For comparison, here's the X-15 at 300.000 ft in EarthView:

Image

and in our standard rendering pushed to the limit of huge visibility:

Image

Below ~100 km altitude, EarthView doesn't really give better rendering - but it does give a solid 60 fps, which out default renderer of course does not.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Hooray » Tue Apr 22, 2014 4:23 pm

Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby wlbragg » Tue Apr 22, 2014 5:03 pm

Really nice!
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Thorsten » Tue Apr 22, 2014 7:17 pm

Test with the best NASA has to offer - Earth textured with about 500 m per pixel resolution, cloud layer with about a kilometer per pixel. It's more than a GB worth of textures - but it sure looks pretty.


Image
Image
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Thorsten » Thu Apr 24, 2014 7:07 am

Spent some time to add cloud shadows. With a global cloudsphere, it's actually fairly trivial to do, and it gives the scene a sense of depth.

Image

Image
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Thorsten » Fri Apr 25, 2014 6:39 am

Enhanced specular reflections on water (note how nicely they mesh with cloud shadows :-) )

Image

and light color change in the dusk/dawn region:

Image

I wonder if any 3d modeler could be bothered to take a few minutes to look at the earthsphere model. Somehow, by manually dragging things around in ac3d I never managed to get a precise alignment of all the model and texture parts, and I think there must be a proper way to do this without generating seams, but I have zero experience with ac3d and am essentially just messing around.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby galvedro » Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:31 am

That looks fantastic Thorsten! I can't tell if it is better or worse than Orbiter, but it is certainly on par with the visuals I remember from my days with that sim.
Perhaps I can lend you a hand with the earth model, it shouldn't be too difficult in Blender. What would you need specifically?
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Hooray » Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:36 am

indeed, it does look fantastic - and it's once again proof that there's so much that can be done with FlightGear without necessarily having to touch any C++ code (I am aware of Torsten's recent atmosphere commit though) - but otherwise, we really spent months debating with vitos (and a few others), while it would have been so much better to just stop debating and start prototyping... to make our case. Once again, you are proving everybody wrong who said this couldn't be done without "major re-architecting" of FlightGear and that it would take an "army of core developers", kudos ! :D
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Thorsten » Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:56 am

That looks fantastic Thorsten! I can't tell if it is better or worse than Orbiter


It's rough around the edges, but in several ways better than what Orbiter 2010 can deliver. Orbiter has a hard-coded restriction on the detail level allowed for the clouds and out of the box not much utilizing a modern GPU. I understand there's ongoing development to have a DirectX rendering backend for Orbiter, and that allows some more graphical tricks, but without installing the experimental devel stuff, this is the best I could get from Orbiter 2010 with hires textures:

Image

vs. Earthview at similar altitude:

Image

Note how the ALS shader gets the blue glow of the atmosphere which Orbiter does not.

Here's the cloud issue illustrated - Orbiter 2010:

Image

And Earthview:

Image

I can push 4 times the resolution for the clouds to the renderer - if the texture memory is there, it shows :-)

What would you need specifically?


If you check the earth- and cloudsphere models in current GIT

/Models/Astro/clouds_unitscale_hires.ac
/Models/Astro/earth_unitscale_hires.ac

they're all spheres cut into 8 pieces which are individually textured. However, in cutting and texturing, I haven't managed to make the seams match up precisely - there's probably some trick beyond moving things around with the mouse and hoping for precision which I don't understand. So right now the model shows seams - and it'd be nice to not have them.

Ideally, also cutting Earth into even finer pieces might be nice and ease some of the re-loading stress. But I had no clue how to map the textures correctly then...
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby galvedro » Fri Apr 25, 2014 12:31 pm

Ok, I'll have a look at it.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Johan G » Fri Apr 25, 2014 9:51 pm

Nice seeing this moving a bit forward. :D
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby AGamingLeprechaun » Sat Apr 26, 2014 11:24 am

FlightGear is really progressing! Loving the amazing development at the moment :)
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v0.1]

Postby Bjoern » Sat Apr 26, 2014 4:57 pm

And now for a fork named FlightGear Space Program, heh...
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