njord

Thanks a lot! AppLogMode is just what i needed

Hello everyone. As you know there are lots of messages that the LE engine prints out such as : "Loading texture "e:/workspace/iss/out/data/ig/leadwerksrenderer/materials/custom/clouds/cloud7.dds"..." etc. Is there any LE or C++ or Visual Studio way to disable these couts of engine.dll ? These messages really make it hard for us to see our own debug print outs. Thanks in advance.

I have looked at the materials of that gmf mate (LESDK 2.5\Models\Weapons\smg). There is nothing special in there, like disabling depth writing or testing.

We use LE engine as graphics renderer only. Our physics engine uses obj files (Nvidia Physx). So for debug purposes, loading and attaching the obj to a gmf greatly helps on runtime debugging.

Are you suggesting I should make it 1.0 m mate ? But inside the helicopter, i barely have 1m space for the pilot to sit. So if i make the near plane a large value like that, I wont be able to see the gauges buttons and joysticks in front of me, they will be clipped. I can scale the model up, there comes my Q1 above By the way : Right now my camera near clip is 0.35 and far clip is 500-1000-10000 - i tried different values. 0.35 is the highest value i can reach when DAYNIGHT script skybox is still visually bug free. If you change near plane to 0.40 lets' say, skybox cubic planes start to disappear. In other words, decreasing far clip plane did not help with jitter much i guess, but increasing near plane from 0.1ish values to 0.35 did help.

Hello again! We are creating a helicopter simulation as I told, so by modifying the near range, disabling SSAO and terrain shadows I have managed to reduce the precision loss problems to an acceptable level on a 30kmx30km terrain (1024x1024 resolution, 32m each tile length). Also by increasing the slope on the water-land intersection geometry, my waterplane flickering is reduced too. Thanks to Flexman However, as the project progressed, we have modelled a detailed helicopter, and when the pilot (camera) sits inside it, all the tiny buttons and gauges on the panel JITTER on far locations ! So I need further optimizations to further mitigate this problem. A dirty solution : I scaled up ONLY the helicopter by 5-10 times. From the point of view of the camera, everything seems properly scaled, but in fact, I am inside a giant helicopter and all the buttons and gauges are like 5 m away from me. Since they are both bigger and further, no problem in visual scale, unless you take a look from outside It is still not a problem, if i look from outside, i can scale back to normal size. However, when i land, or collide with an object, - since my collision geo is still small and it should stay that way, objects penetrate through the helicopter. To work around this, i need a special material that will render the helicopter over/after all other geometry. First of all , I want to ask you, how to make a "depthtest off" and "render last" material. As i have posted on another topic, I have managed to come up with a material like below : texture0="abstract::blackwhite.dds" color=1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0 depthmask=1 colormask=1 depthtest=0 castshadows=0 invisible=0 specular=0.5 gloss=0.5 bumpscale=0.5 zsort=1 cullface=1 overlay=0 blend=0 shader="abstract::mesh_diffuse.vert","abstract::mesh_diffuse.frag" depthtest=0 and zsort=1 : this makes the entity to be visible even when it is occluded by another object, great! However the entity is slightly transparent! If I make zsort=0, than entity is rendered last, even when it is actually in front of me. Q1. What is the proper way of "no depthtest & render last" == make something properly "always visible"? -------------------------- This is my quick and dirty solution of course, so I want to learn more about what you have gone through Flexman, if you don't mind Can you or anyone answer these questions also ? Q2.Converting LE source code into double is not easy right ? Also you couldn't "fully" do it as i understand, did it help a bit anyway? Do you recommend me to follow the same path by obtaining the source code and modifying? Q3."Modify shaders to add more depth bias based on distance from camera" == what do you mean by this, which shaders specifically, can u post a very simple example or give more insight to get me started ? Q4."User the material overlay flag where appropriate" it is used by decals as far as i know, to translate the decal surface a little bit closer to the camera. How can it help me ? Shall I write my "gauge, button, joystick" materials this way ? But, my problem with the helicopter cockpit surfaces is not flickering, it is the geometry degredation mostly. Vertices just move, its like they are not made of a solid matter Q5."Render the scene in layers and blend them" how can i do that, what is the reasoning behind it/how will it help ? Thank you very much for reading all this and noob questions if any Cheers! visuals : (On the second image, black and white cube is between terrain and helicopter. But as you see it is always fully visible even occluded. However, it is transparent as well. I dont want it to be.)

I can load ".obj" files in LE using C++ coding and this free library : http://www.kixor.net/dev/objloader/ . U need to loop over all faces, their vertices, normals, and materials, and create a geometry on the runtime. It is pretty easy to do i can post a simple code chunk if anyone wants to take a look.

In other words, I am asking how to show a gun in your hand properly, not penetrating other objects or walls, without any tricks like scaling/positioning, but by using "depthtest disabling" and "rendering last" ???

Maybe you have two identically named materials in your working directory. LE indeterministically indexes and uses only one of them - probably wrong one, although you correct the other material. The problem is obviously related to zsort = 1 in my opinion. Check if you have identically named resources under your working directory or registered abstract path. Use absolute paths instead of abstract:: .

I tried to do the same thing for a "Gizmo 3D" model, so that each entity would have colored local axis arrows attached to its pivot, showing its relative orientation and position. But of course, I wanted Gizmo to be always visible just like in the Editor. Disabling depthtest is not enough. You also have to force the material to be rendered "last". Zsort=1 forces the object to be rendered last, but also it sorts these kind of objects before drawing, and makes them transparent. I have tested with a lot of objects instanced, if u use Zsort=1, it decreases the performance way faster than a Zsort=0 mat due to sorting. Partial solution to your problem would be using a material like this : texture0="abstract::blackwhite.dds" color=1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0 depthmask=1 colormask=1 depthtest=0 castshadows=0 invisible=0 specular=0.5 gloss=0.5 bumpscale=0.5 zsort=1 cullface=0 overlay=0 blend=0 shader="abstract::mesh_diffuse.vert","abstract::mesh_diffuse.frag" But you will have a semi transparent mat. Any one knows how to fix that, I would be glad to know. My gizmos are transparent, i dont want them to be. I just want them to be always visible.

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Thank you very much for your long explanation Flexman. Indeed we are trying to create a terrain for a helicopter simulation too It should be 30x30 km so the furthest location from origin will be 15000,15000 (plus the chopper can elevate into sky like 5000 or 10000 meters). By turning off terrain shadows and ssao, also by adjusting camera planes to 0.35,7500 now we have a rather acceptable level of visual artifacts & bugs, spiced with proper DOF and fog. However, can you explain more about your advices below ? We will also try building simple models without intersecting polygons as you suggest. I will post how much it will help. PS: our terrain heightmap is 512x512x100m now (I modified 512x512x10m sbx to have a instead 100m resolution grid). This causes some small differences between the phy and gmf of the terrain. However since we use LE for only visualisation, it seems ok for us.

When fov was 51 degrees, I shortened my directional light shadow distance by changing multipler = 3 to 0.3 on the below code (simply made shadow distances 2.4m,12m,24m. They were 24m,120m,240m before.). This get rids of the "partially or fully disappearing shadow" bug. Of course , now there are shadows only up to 24 meters which is looking really bad with low fov. Another possible solution is increasing the FOV to 60+. But i need small field of view in my case. I will even use 45 degrees in the future. object.pivot = CreatePivot() object.light = CreateDirectionalLight() multiplier = 0.3 --was 3.0 before SetShadowDistance(object.light,8*multiplier,0) SetShadowDistance(object.light,40*multiplier,1) SetShadowDistance(object.light,80*multiplier,2) object.light:SetShadowmapSize(2048) multiplier = 2 SetShadowOffset(object.light,0.31*multiplier, 1.0, 0) SetShadowOffset(object.light,0.40*multiplier, 1.0, 1) SetShadowOffset(object.light,0.70*multiplier, 1.0, 2) SetShadowOffset(object.light,1.50*multiplier, 1.0, 3) PS: Josh, the shadows disappear on the borders of "directional light shadow stages".

Hi all. I encountered a strange problem with shadows, when field of view is small. When fov is 70 or 80 degrees there is no problem, but when I decrease it, lets say 50,55 degrees, shadow bugs (may) occur. First I thought it may be a problem related to our custom models or daynight script. But then I performed some tests on Editor and reproduced the bug. Create a terrain in editor. Drag atmoshpere and directional light. Drag in the monster truck (a little higher from the surface to see its shadow easily). Configure editor field of view to 51 degrees. Move back and forward in the direction of monster truck. You will see its shadow partially or fully disappearing based on camera distance and viewing angle. Strangely, one of our custom models, (airport bridges) do not produce the same shadow artifacts. Maybe it is related to pivot point ? Here are 2 video links showing monster truck with shadow bug, airport bridges without shadow bug : ftp://81.214.87.33/ port:21 username : katron pass : katron2012 filenames : FOV_SHADOW_PROBLEM.avi FOV_SHADOW_PROBLEM_2.avi Here is a screenshot for a quick glance:

Hello all guys! I have created the largest terrain possible in LE which is 4096x4096x10m (in fact, by modifying sbx with notepad, u can make it even larger). On distant locations (relative to origin), I see artifacts on shadow maps and UV assignments as well as geometry degredation which I believe all due to floating point precision loss. Here is the related video, although you can check it out yourself by creating a terrain in Editor. Parts of terrain at locations (0,0,0), (7500,0,7500), (15000,0,15000), (20480,0,20480). : ftp://81.214.87.33/ user : katron pass : katron2012 file : "LE 4096x10m map precision problem - DIVX.avi" What are your comments on this issue ? (One possible dirty solution : I can move the terrain and objects on it instead of moving the cam ) PS: I encountered precision problem on my previous job, where we were implementing a google earth clone 3D app. We were visualising the whole earth along with a tiny house or road sign in the same scene. We solved the issue by utilizing "camera relative rendering" & "using double precision math on vector calculations taking place on cpu" & "enabling consistent floating point mode on direct3D".