Hmm, the last post of 2001. It’s been a good year for OGRE, with lots of new features and quite a lot more exposure than previously. 2002 here we come.
On the feature front, skyboxes are now working; I have taken an alternative approach by using the kind of cube maps 3D Studio can generate for the 6 planes of the cube to create a complete warp-around environment (e.g. space).
OGRE will support 3 types of sky:
- Sky planes – totally flat and very large, these are good for underwater scenes (as the surface of the water) and fogged outdoor scenes. Skyplanes can have moving textures.
- Skyboxes – using 6 separate textures and completely immersive and with no joins, these are useful for static surrounding backgrounds e.g. space. They can’t have moving textures because of the pre-distortion of the textures, but you can rotate the skybox itself to produce a rotating sky.
- Sky domes – actually a 5-sided cube made to look curved, these
use flat textures but a distortion effect makes the sky look curved in order to add to the realism. Useful for scenes where there is always land below the viewer and where (global) fog is not being used. Various degrees of curvature can be used depending on whether the sky is mostly viewed upwards or whether it also needs to look good when viewed laterally.
The first 2 are already done, the the sky domes are on the way. I’ve been neglecting the other aspects of textures (texture scrolls and warps) because of the sky work but I’ll be back to it soon.
Oh, and I also added support for animated textures today. You have to change frames manually right now – I’ll change this when I introduce my ‘controller’ class hierarchy which can control any parametric value (frame number, texture coordinate, colour value etc etc) by using various wave functions (a traditional animation loop is a sawtooth wave, for example). Watch this space.
Happy new year to everybody!