chris wrote:I've been working lately on improving the Celestia's rendering of meshes, which has for a long time lagged behind planet rendering and modern graphics hardware capabilities. I've implemented a lot of things which will make meshes look a lot better:
- Models can be shadowed by spherical bodies. Eclipse shadows appear on irregular bodies just as they do on spherical bodies. Satellites in low earth orbit will slip in and out of shadow as the orbit over the night side of Earth. Irregular objects will still not cast shadows themselves, however; that's work for the future.--Chris
I just have a couple of questions about plans for models in shadow. Currently of course, light passes straight thru planets to fall on satellites, which means they are still illuminated when they should be in shadow.
With this improved rendering, they will truly be in the dark in many circumstances. Currently however, setting ambient light to a non-zero value will allow you to see them. (Ambient light is a kludge for reasons of practicality I guess, but not at all realistic)
I was wondering if the plan was to go totally realistic (in certain render paths) and therefore disable the ability to increase ambient above zero, or will it be retained for the practical reasons above?
IMO, without it, in the absence of planet/star shine, this would "render" (no pun intended) these objects effectively invisible for large parts of their orbits, which may make for a more realistic experience, but probably less interesting. I know that you also have plans to implement planetshine at some stage, although I'm not sure how much affect that would have on the shadow side (I guess there's some leakage around the edges of the planet in reality).
I was just wondering if you have any thoughts/plans regarding the best way to combine the existing functionality with all these new more realistic features.
Existing functionality retained but able to be switched on/off as per the status quo I guess?