Re: Photo "Plan B" interim results

mat churchill wrote:
> Have got some terrain following photo scenery working.
> 
> http://freespace.virgin.net/mamaloucos.circus/Flightgearweb/index.html
> 
> I have noticed Terragear doesn't know that Flightgear doesn't care about
> material names.

If a material name is not in the "library", FlightGear will look for a 
texture by that name in the same directory as the .btg file.  If it finds a 
texture, it will immediately load it and build a library entry on the fly.

> I created /data/Textures/Photo and added 20 new photo
> images (made with chop.pl), each with their own material name and
> details in materials.xml. Flightgear is having no problem using them.

Yes, this is how chop.pl was intended to work.

> However tguserdef seems to need the material name to be one of the
> standard Flightgear materials. So the only way I can assign the photo
> images to the scenery squares I have made is to use Flightgear Scenery
> Designer to do it after I have built the .btg files (this is very slow).
> Is there a command I can pass to tguserdef to allow it to use any
> material name, or can I modify it to not care ?
> 
> I am quite happy with the results given they are a prototype, but am
> getting annoying creases in the terrain where the "photo squares" I have
> made join. Does anyone have any ideas on how to stop this ?

Yes, what you want to do is simply divide up the line segments along the 
edge so that there is a point every couple hundred meters or so.  You 
probably want to play with the exact distance to find a balance between 
polygon count and seam minimization.

> Needless to say having a lot of fun, would appreciate any comments on
> the above.

Glad someone is playing with this stuff.  The results look great!

Curt.
-- 
Curtis Olson   HumanFIRST Program               FlightGear Project
Twin Cities    curt 'at' me.umn.edu             curt 'at' flightgear.org
Minnesota      http://www.flightgear.org/~curt  http://www.flightgear.org