Andy Ross <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > The basic idea is pretty simple, but the edge cases (non-closed > meshes, for instance) turned out to be enormously hard to get right. > But the final result looks really good -- none of the "diagonal > shading stripes" that you see on many of the aircraft wings due to > being mis-lit at a corner. And it's really not slow at all -- it > happens only at load time, and in my experience was noise compared to > the I/O and parsing overhead. It does, obviously, increase the vertex > count; but no more than a "properly" lit/normaled model would have in > the first place. And it has the notable advantage of allowing the > modeller to preserve the mesh structure without worrying about vertex > duplication and normal direction.
I think with flightgear, the concern could be more with the loading of scenery elements (that depends on vertex counts). That isn't to say that the process couldn't be improved from where I got with it. Without going further, my conclusion was that there were some basic problems with the way the optimiser was messing with the vertices and that if these behaviors were eliminated the modeler could control crease shading the same way they can in the ac3d 3.6 and earlier editor views (by having non-shared vertices on adjacent surfaces). Problem areas in the plib loader are the merging/snapping of vertices, and possibly some information lost during triangulation (so that normals that ought not get averaged, might still). Generally, I'm more in favor with leaving control in the hands of the modeler and not doing things like adding vertices to fix up the shading. Best, Jim _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
