> Stuart, one thing that caught me out earlier today with using 2D cloud > layers - while using a 2D layer and modifying visibility inside the > layer is working quite well, the edge (moving vertically) is very sharp. > I wonder if there's some technique to perturb the top and bottom of the > cloud layer as the view transitions them, so it feels more natural. Or > maybe there's even better ways to handle overcast / broken layers than > the current 2D approach?
I've done some experiments in that department when I started on clouds. It doesn't help you to actually perturb the sheet, because what you want is a fluffy appearance of the cloud fading into the sky, whereas if you introduce more vertices into the sheet and randnomize them, you get a sharp line separating cloud and sky. There are two techniques which probaby do work. They're based on projecting the view integral through the upper (lower) edge of the cloud layer onto something. The easiest would be to simply paint it on the skydome, but I guess that requires that the skydome is done in a shader, not in the default scheme. The alternative is to introduce a faraway quad which you just keep at the same distance from the plane onto which you paint the cloud edge. I'm not sure how this quad would best be moved and transformed. The skydome technique would be fairly trivial, all it requires is to match colors with the layer correctly (which is a problem in its own, because the 2d clouds do not seem to participate in scene lighting properly). * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
