Steve Baker (sbaker++at++link.com)
Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:37:20 -0500 (CDT)
> I'm not into doing any ocean stuff yet but I know it's coming. Hearing about
> sea textures made me ponder what would be required to do a simple sea. For
> the basics does one just lay down a huge polygon and sea texture it?
That depends entirely on what you want it for.
* If it's for ships - then you may need simple 3D waves.
* If it's for a surf-board - then you need complex 3D waves
with breakers and surf.
* If it's for high altitude aircraft - then you may need to model
a spheroidal segment of ocean to represent the curvature of the
earth.
* If it's for low altitude aircraft - then you may want moving
wave textures.
* If it's for a submarine then you may need an ocean bottom.
* If it's for shallow water operation then you may need a
translucent ocean polygon and an ocean bottom.
* If it's for zooplankton....you get the idea.
...actualy, you'll probably need a combination of those things
for any given real application.
For VERY large areas of ocean, a single polygon doesn't work too
well because you can end up with a LOT of texture map repeats and
most hardware doesn't like very large numbers of map repeats on a
single polygon - I forget all the details but on ancient RE2 hardware,
there was a performance hit and a point came where the texture would
just screw up and display the wrong thing.
That was (IIRC) fixed on iR hardware - but there are still precision
issues that would make it desirable to split the ocean polygon into
large tiles. We do that anyway to represent earth curvature properly,
so it's no big deal.
Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
Raytheon Systems Inc. (817)619-2466 (Fax)
Work: SBaker++at++link.com http://www.hti.com
Home: SJBaker1++at++airmail.net http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Oct 23 1998 - 09:37:44 PDT