Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Dave Martin said: Hopefully, by the time I've finished, everyone will own 6800 class video cards to cope with all the polys (any maybe I'll own one too so I can finish the models) ;-) Those look fantastic! Judging from the pictures, I don't think there will be much trouble. Sometimes you can cheat a bit and make something that is physically incorrect but looks good in 3D. Otherwise even with several hundred vertices there won't be a problem with most cheap video cards. The textures and transparencies are more likely to hit the frame rates on the 32mb cards. Of course this wouldn't exactly be the case if you were modeling an original SST cockpit with several dozens of instruments showing at once. But you are not so I wouldn't worry alot about it, so long as you are being efficient. It would be very nice to get some good 3D instrumentation into the default c172. Best, Jim ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Dave Martin wrote: You probably know by now that I have a serious case of 'show and tell' syndrome. :-) Hopefully, by the time I've finished, everyone will own 6800 class video cards to cope with all the polys (any maybe I'll own one too so I can finish the models) ;-) Looks very nice, but the instrument covers seem indeed a bit polygon heavy. To be honest I can't really think of a way to cheat a bit to decrease the polygon count. Erik ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
On Friday 31 Dec 2004 09:03, Erik Hofman wrote: Looks very nice, but the instrument covers seem indeed a bit polygon heavy. To be honest I can't really think of a way to cheat a bit to decrease the polygon count. Erik While I didn't set out to produce low-poly instruments (I wanted to prioritise them looking 'round') , I've used most tricks in the book to keep the vertex count down. Just by way of example, comparing the Hawker Hunter's AI with my AI: The Hunter bezels are made in 16 segments. My bezels are made in 24 segments. My AI also has an extra 24 segment disk for it's 'Glass' Hunter AI: 346 vertices. Mine: 188 I was pleasantly suprised at that. :-) I finished a TC with animated slip-ball last night. I'd been dreading that instrument because of the slip-ball animation; as it turns out, it only took 5 mins with a bit of concentration. I literally chucked all the instruments into the PA28 (just so they were in view and animated) and I was not getting any noticable frame-rate hit (yet) over the default panel. Time will tell - at the very worst case, these instruments are actually a lot of fun to make so nothing is lost if they can't be used or if they have to go in the cupboard for a couple of years while hardware catches up ;-) Cheers. Dave Martin ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Dave Martin wrote: Time will tell - at the very worst case, these instruments are actually a lot of fun to make so nothing is lost if they can't be used or if they have to go in the cupboard for a couple of years while hardware catches up ;-) These instruments look really marvellous. I wish you'd release the stuff so everyone can compare it to the default instrumentation on their individual platform. I believe there are platforms out in the wild, even not that up to date, that won't be hit that much by ploygon count I myself would love to try it out in order to see how much the polygon count has influence on the frame rate. Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Erik Hofman wrote: Looks very nice, but the instrument covers seem indeed a bit polygon heavy. To be honest I can't really think of a way to cheat a bit to decrease the polygon count. They look to pristine though ... you need to add some textures with wear and tear ... maybe put some scratches in the instrument faces, etc.etc. :-) Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Martin Spott writes: I believe there are platforms out in the wild, even not that up to date, that won't be hit that much by ploygon count I myself would love to try it out in order to see how much the polygon count has influence on the frame rate. I think you might be very right there. I used to think that my Radeon 7200 was getting hit by polygon count with complex airports and the recent 3d airport furniture, but it turns out that it's lights that kill it - get a vasi or papi in view and the framerate plummets from the twenties into single figures, whereas even complex airports with no glideslope lighting have neglible effect. I suspect it's the beacon lights rather than poly count that kill it as well. My Geforce3 ti200 by contrast is completely unaffected by the lights. Cheers - Dave ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
On Friday 31 Dec 2004 14:13, Martin Spott wrote: These instruments look really marvellous. Thanks :-) I wish you'd release the stuff so everyone can compare it to the default instrumentation on their individual platform. I'll make them available one way or another once they're all working. I've made a radio set and *almost* got that to work today so it's coming along. I'll perhaps package them so you can use a props value or simillar to switch to them and try them out. I believe there are platforms out in the wild, even not that up to date, that won't be hit that much by ploygon count I myself would love to try it out in order to see how much the polygon count has influence on the frame rate. We shall see ;-) On Friday 31 Dec 2004 14:15, Curtis L. Olson wrote: Erik Hofman wrote: Looks very nice, but the instrument covers seem indeed a bit polygon heavy. To be honest I can't really think of a way to cheat a bit to decrease the polygon count. They look to pristine though ... you need to add some textures with wear and tear ... maybe put some scratches in the instrument faces, etc.etc. :-) Curt. Hey, I've only just made them, so technically, they're brand-new out of the box ;-P I'll go back and have a look at putting textures over the bezels to make scratches and such once I've got everything working; the radios are a nightmare and my texture/digit system is a little flaky at best. Any idea why a frequency of 120.5 apparently gets rounded down to 120.49 when displayed? Cheers all Dave Martin ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Dave Martin wrote: On Friday 31 Dec 2004 14:13, Martin Spott wrote: I believe there are platforms out in the wild, even not that up to date, that won't be hit that much by ploygon count I myself would love to try it out in order to see how much the polygon count has influence on the frame rate. We shall see ;-) The old SGI MGRAS boards (first seen in the mid nineties, I think) are told to draw almost two million shaded triangles per second just in hardware, I presume they'll cope with a few more polygons. Heavy use of high resolution textures is a different story Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
On Friday 31 Dec 2004 15:27, Martin Spott wrote: Dave Martin wrote: On Friday 31 Dec 2004 14:13, Martin Spott wrote: I believe there are platforms out in the wild, even not that up to date, that won't be hit that much by ploygon count I myself would love to try it out in order to see how much the polygon count has influence on the frame rate. We shall see ;-) The old SGI MGRAS boards (first seen in the mid nineties, I think) are told to draw almost two million shaded triangles per second just in hardware, I presume they'll cope with a few more polygons. Heavy use of high resolution textures is a different story Martin. I heard somewhere that plib can automatically convert textures which are too large for a given video card. Is this the case? Dave Martin ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Dave Martin wrote: On Friday 31 Dec 2004 15:27, Martin Spott wrote: Dave Martin wrote: On Friday 31 Dec 2004 14:13, Martin Spott wrote: I believe there are platforms out in the wild, even not that up to date, that won't be hit that much by ploygon count I myself would love to try it out in order to see how much the polygon count has influence on the frame rate. We shall see ;-) The old SGI MGRAS boards (first seen in the mid nineties, I think) are told to draw almost two million shaded triangles per second just in hardware, I presume they'll cope with a few more polygons. Heavy use of high resolution textures is a different story Martin. I heard somewhere that plib can automatically convert textures which are too large for a given video card. Is this the case? Yes, I believe that is true, although it was always the old voodoo cards that had the 256x256 max texture resolution limits. Most cards these days can handle much larger textures. But do the math xres * yres * 3 (for rgb) or 4 (for rgba) and you quickly realize you can't use too many of these big textures. Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
Curtis L. Olson wrote: Yes, I believe that is true, although it was always the old voodoo cards that had the 256x256 max texture resolution limits. Most cards these days can handle much larger textures. But do the math xres * yres * 3 (for rgb) or 4 (for rgba) and you quickly realize you can't use too many of these big textures. This is the point: The Octane can store large textures of almost any size in RAM and it has a 1,6 GByte/s crossbar (although I believe RAM is supposed not to be _that_ speedy) but it has only a 5 MByte texture cache on the graphics board for small, repeating textures, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
[Flightgear-devel] 3D instrument kit.
You probably know by now that I have a serious case of 'show and tell' syndrome. So I just wanted to show you what I've been up to today ;-) So far I've made 6 instruments which could possibly be used for lightplanes. The instruments include depth-oriented components and face-glasses which show specular highlights depending on sun-angle. Screenshots: http://www.cyfinity.com/fgfs/3dins2.jpg http://www.cyfinity.com/fgfs/3dins3.jpg http://www.cyfinity.com/fgfs/3dins4.jpg The above is just a 'mock-up' of static models so I could place them all in FG at the same time. (AI and DI are missing glasses). The ASI, VSI, Tacho and AI are fully animated now. The DI is partly animated and the Altimeter needs its baro animated. Hopefully, by the time I've finished, everyone will own 6800 class video cards to cope with all the polys (any maybe I'll own one too so I can finish the models) ;-) Dave Martin ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
