Hello members, I'm creating a cloud simulation at the moment for my company. For demonstration purposes, I had to create terrain and water as well. This is what I've come up with: http://www.nilsschneider.de/temp/demo2.avi (DivX 5.1 required) This demo runs in realtime on a Geforce FX 6800. Regards, Lyve

Looks awsome Lyve, quite frankly.

But, one thing struck me in your post:

Quote: This demo runs in realtime on a Geforce FX 6800.

You usually advertise that something runs real time on a very cheap graphics card, not on a top of the line one... maybe its just me, and you're trying to make a diferent point [wink]

Anyways, keep it up, looks excelent.

That kind of video card doesn't exist, but anyways it's really cool!

Looks excellent, congrats!

I did something like this (minus the terrain/skybox) last month, but it handles much bigger cloud distances (up to the horizon). I have a video but i won't link to it here unless the OP says it's okay with him (don't want to hijack his thread). It runs from 150 to 600 fps on a GF 6800, too. But i spent an insane amount of time on my impostors system.

Y.

Amazing stuff ! Can you provide some more information on how terrain, water and clouds are generated ? Did you you use shaders and VBO ?

Hmm got any closeups of the terrain? :) Looks so "fluffy" from that point of view :)

Thanks for all your replies.

@Prozak

Our customers are receiving a complete machine where the software is already installed, and we always use the fastest graphics cards available.

@DudeMiester

Sorry I ment A Geforce 6800 ;) BTW a FX 5950 is working with an acceptable framerate as well. A 5700 is not enough though.

@Ysaneya

That sounds interesting! Would really like to see it. Could you send me a link to the video?

@penetrator

Yes I used both VBO and shaders (2.0).

Terrain: The terrain consists of a height map where a diffuse map is mapped onto it. Additionally, a normal map is used for bump mapping to fake an increase of the resolution of the height map.

Water: A normal map is used to have surface normals per pixel to look into a cube map (the same that is used as sky map) for the reflection color value. Four layers of the texture with different scaling factors are combined before fetching from the cube map. All four layers are s-t-animated in slightly different directions. The sun reflection is made by using the typical formula for specular reflection of a point light.

Clouds: Textured quads are used that are aligned to the camera within the vertex shader. The base texture is looking quite like a corona, just a normal "ball". Lots of those balls are rendered to generate the clouds. A second texture is blended onto the ball texture. It's a perlin noise texture map that is s-t-animated to fake animation of the clouds. The clouds are moved on the x-y-plane to take the wind into account

Shadow: The clouds are rendered into a pbuffer from the top, and the resulting pbuffer is blended with the terrain.

The video of this version is a little bit old, I changed the water to reach the horizon and I've created a horizon using fog.

Lyve: you can see it here (note: 9.2 MB MPEG1 format). There's a bit of popping but that's because the framerate suffered when i recorded the video live - it's normally invisible at high framerates.

Y.

Thats looking very good!

How did you do the lighting of the clouds, is it calculated statically before the rendering or in realtime?

I'm impressed by the amount of clouds you are rendering, your impostors seem to be very efficient!

Lyve

where'd you get heightmap data for the uk from?
apart from that, the sky and clouds and water looks amazing. almost makes me want to implement my cloud/skydome ideas, but i know i wont, i just discovered the wonders of Wolfenstien Enemy Territory and i'll waste a few weeks before i'm bored with that.