Sky dome, volumetric clouds, directional point lights, trees

General Discussion
1

I have a long standing UAV flight controller hobby project I’ve been carrying forward through several jobs and still try to dabble with time permitting.

Part of the work is to establish a solid simulation environment for testing avionics / flight controller code, control laws, all the stuff. And as part of this I’ve built a small out-the-window world visualization tool. The visualization tool currently fetches SRTM terrain along with google/bing/maptiler(your free api key needed) imagery to create a fairly compelling view of the world and you can fly anywhere in the world. Don’t ask me what happens if one of the poles comes into view … I haven’t tried that yet. :slight_smile:

Imagine something on par with google earth from 15 years ago, but written in python/panda3d. Here is a 1 minute youtube video (sorry for the poor quality.)

Ok, so getting to my questions. I have been thinking about future features I would like to add and I’m wondering if there is existing work out there that I can borrow from (or possibly anyone who finds this interesting enough to want to do something with it themselves.)

I currently have been flying with a static skybox which looks pretty nice, but never changes. Has anyone developed something more dynamic that could possibly support time of day, sunset/sunrise effects, etc.? I use a local Z=up coordinate system. Long ago I built something like this for FlightGear but I don’t have as much time (or energy?) as I did back in my 20’s. :slight_smile:

Along with this, has anyone developed volumetric clouds for Panda3d? I would love to have realistic 3d clouds that I could fly above, below, and through. I did not develop this for FlightGear so I’m pretty clueless for what approach would even be worth exploring, easy/hard?

I also would love to add runway lights. These (ideally) are directional so they are brightest when you are flying down the approach to a runway, and can be pretty dim if you are looking at them from the side. Even more fun is that the color could be different if you look at the light point from one end of the runway versus the other. Long ago for FlightGear I made something like this work using environmental maps and abusing a side effect of drawing triangles in point mode … and we eventually abandoned that because it wan’t a real supported opengl feature. There could easily be 100’s of these sorts of lights visible simultaneously. Does panda3d have any built in support for these sorts of out-doors point light sources? I would want to be able to control visibility, have them punch through fog, but I don’t think they would need to illuminate anything, just be nice looking point lights.

Also, I want to eventually add trees (maybe from land use/land cover databases). Does panda3d have any support for dropping in 1000’s (or millions?) of itty bitty tree models across a landscape?

I would want to optimize this for out-door rendering … usually from a distance.

Sorry, I know this is a lot all at once. Not something I am expecting to have finished in a few months, but these are some future goals I’m thinking towards and wondering if there are panda3d features that already exist to help me move forward.

Thanks!

2

Hmm… It might be a big change to incorporate, but you could perhaps look at RenderPipeline.

While I haven’t used it myself, and thus can’t speak to whether it does quite what you want, it looks like it might well do at least some of it.

I’m not sure of how this would interact with fog, but could you perhaps just use simple quads with an image of a light, oriented to face as appropriate, and set to be unlit?

(Perhaps with a billboard effect to make them turn towards the player, and a bit of control code to set their alpha-scale to some value related to the dot product of their current direction and their “forward” direction.)

Not to the best of my knowledge, no. You might want to look for middleware solutions for that. (If you don’t want to build your own, of course.)

(Although I see that one of the screenshots on the RenderPipeline (see above) GitHub page depicts a lot of trees. Whether it has built-in support for such, or that’s a specially prepared scene, or what, I don’t know.)