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Submitted by , posted on 04 May 2004
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Image Description, by
The images presented above refer to the graphic engine DigtalNature, on which I
work at my spare time.
So, these images were rendered with speed 12 and 14 milliseconds (this equals to
83 and 71 fps) using Direct3D, on
the system AMD Athlon XP+1700, 256 RAM, GeForce-4 Ti4200-128Mb, system bus rate
133 MHz, AGP-4X, but I have to
stress that those framerates were rendered under "Debug mode" of VC6.0 compiler
(with "Release mode" speed will
raise to ~7 and ~8 ms).
The engine has been developing for a long time (it still developing), the main
purpose of the engine is a flight
simulator project.
The main features, which were designed for the project are:
Huge landscapes and small RAM & hard disk requiriments: The engine works
with the landscapes, which dimensions
greater than 100x100 Km, detail level = 10 Meters (it means that we have height
map with resolution more than
10000x10000 pixels). Special for reducing map size compression techniques were
developed on the basis: DCT, which
uses Loeffler's fast multiplication transformation and Huffman compressing,
FELICS compression techniques for
loseless compression during map design, and 4-bit RLC technique as well. All
compression techniques are transparent
for game-play process. Final map size (100x100 Km, 10 meters) = ~50 Mb for game,
and ~90 Mb for map design process.
Huge forest areas. A special algorithm for fast 3D forest rendering was
developed. It uses impostors for far
forest rendering and complete 3D trees for close distance. The forest is
rendering with batches, so time required
for rendering 10x10 Km forest is about 3-6 ms (depends upon the distance to the
ground from the air).
Fast clouds rendering technique, uses multiple forware scattering techique
by Mark J. Harris
(http://www.cs.unc.edu/~harrism/clouds), the technique uses impostors and
renders clouds of a very high quality
with fast framerates.
Water effects. Water technique uses Environment Bumpmapping for fast
rendering performance.
Grass. The grass is another interesting feature of the engine. It renders
good-looking grass (depends on the
artist talent) within the distance 100 meters. I'd like to stress, that grass is
the object which requires
rendering time less than 1 ms.
Roads, decals. The engine supports roads and decals. One major thing is that
roads always lying on terrain at
any terrain LOD (no artifacts with popping above the ground and drowning under
the ground).
Of course, all the above features are on the choice of user. The user can
disable, or reduce quality of these
features.
More pictures see at: http://www.d-strict.com/main.php?lang=eng&page=gallery
e-mail: regmail at hotbox.ru
I write programming articles. One of them is about forest and terrain rendering
technique:
http://www.gamedev.ru/articles/read.shtml?id=30125 (NOTE: it is in Russian,
English translation coming soon, and it
will be uploaded to www.d-strict.com).
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