[SOLVED] Stars billboard trough the landscape

[Antoine]

Hi,

I had a stars system thanks to the instructions on the following link but the stars can be seen trough the map.

https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.10/objects/objects/billboards/billboards_stars/?words=star%2Ccatalog#highlight

The depth test of my stars material is set to true, an the far clip is set to 2500 while my last object is at 2000. The visibility by sector of the star ObjectBillboard is set to true as well.

I don't understand why this is happening, if you have any ideas that would be a great help!

 

 

 

 

[vvvaseckiy]

Hello Antoine,

Is the stars could be seen through any object or terrain only? Also please specify which terrain you are using. ObjectLandscapeTerrain or TerrainGlobal? And which version of SDK you are running on

Thanks

[Antoine]

Hi Vvvaaseckiy,

I'm currently working with the 2.10 version of the sdk. This is happening with every ObjectMeshStatic of my world including the ObjectCloudLayer. I don't have a ObjectLandscapeTerrain or TerrainGlobal.

Thanks,

[vvvaseckiy]

This is really strange behavior. As for the ObjectCloudLayer it is expected that transparent objects(with Alpha Blend transparency preset) may render over the clouds, for that case there is special option - Settings/Render/Clouds/Render After Transparent, if you enable this option, the clouds should be correctly overlapping stars billboards.

But as for every ObjectMeshStatic being overlapped by stars billboards, we were unable to reproduce this bug. Can you please verify that it is reproducible in default world, with default settings for billboard_stars, or attach a small scene where this bug occurs

[Antoine]

I managed to fix it! My bad, my radius was to small causing the first star to be in front of my landscape panorama mesh.

Just changing the radius did the trick!

 

[sebastian.vesenmayer]

Hi @vvvaseckiy

We have the same problem with stars and clouds,

when we are setting Render after Transparent, particle effects will not been show anymore when clouds are in background.

Will this change in the future to have more control over when alpha blended objects will be rendered before or after clouds?

Is there another approach in Unigine to get stars always rendered first because they are the most far away objects at the sky?

Thanks

Edited February 3, 2022 by sebastian.vesenmayer

[silent]

Quote

Is there another approach in Unigine to get stars always rendered first because they are the most far away objects at the sky?

In IG we use simple stars cubemap from NASA website. Works fine for most of the cases and it's cheap to render. Since you can rotate it you can adjust stars positions to match the current geo location.

Billboard stars technically can be drawn at last, but that would require clouds changes at first (-perf) and all the currently existing materials changes (in order to be able to have rendering order selector). Right now it's impossible to render specific material in different mode (that will ignore clouds sorting setting).

We will see how to improve clouds sorting in the future updates (but I'm afraid not in the 2.16).

Thanks!

 

[silent]

Actually, you can try to subscribe to CALLBACK_BEGIN_TRANSPARENT (that is executed just before the clouds rendering) and render ambient pass from this billboard object. Something like this:

	Vector<NodePtr> billboards = ...;
	for (const auto& node : billboards)
	{
		const auto obj = checked_ptr_cast<Object>(node);
		for (int i = 0; i < obj->getNumSurfaces(); ++i)
			obj->render(Render::PASS_AMBIENT, i);
	}

Maybe that will help :)