New Worlds

[Steve]

I love visiting new worlds but lately I haven't really seen too many new worlds being published or at least linked for display. It would really be cool to see Bruce's Asteroid world be available for visitation at some point. Just looking at the VIDEO he posted compells me to want to explore it.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? ;)

[Bruce Lehmann]

We have to get people active on the 'Worlds List' page again. I will link some when I get a chance

[Bruce Lehmann]

Here is the link though. :-)

http://www.spafon.com/asteroidfield/asteroidfield.wrl

[vcard]

Very nice!
Loved the idea and the good feelings this world emanates :-)

[Bruce Lehmann]

Thanks, I would love to see more stuff posted here, even if only in a single viewer mode, or just a link to a .wrl file. I am sure there is alot of great stuff out there that never makes it to ABNet or Revemonde or any other server. Kind of what I hope for the 'Worlds List' page.

[Steve]

Thanks for sharing Bruce! :)

Very cool concept. an idea like this could go a long ways! I just really enjoying viewing new worlds as well. Shared on a chat server is great but even single user mode is nice too. Would be nice if everyone shared their worlds. :)
I will share an older world i made basically for a test. this was made probably 2003'ish. I made it to experiement with terrain and water techniques in reflections and underwater transitions. There isnt alot in this world but somehow i always thought of it as being peaceful. :)

http://home.comcast.net/~lazerousvr/worlds/terra/terra.wrl

[Bruce Lehmann]

Tha is awesome :-) How do you pull that off (remembering that I am a novice at this). Is it an inline?

[Steve]

It isn't really all that difficult. In fact you can do most of this with modelling software. I create a terrain in Bryce that is suited for my purpose and then export it as a .obj file. Then I import it into my modelling software. After I decide where water level will be, the size i want it and the texture map is applied I employ 1 of 2 methods. I want to be able to keep the lake bottom so i have to seperate the two halves cleanly. 1 method is to use a slice modifier. This ends up making a clean break at the point you want, evenm slicing through individual faces so they are realigned along that plane. The other method is to make 2 copies of the terrain. With one copy you do a boolean operation to remove all the faces from above the water line and the other you remove all the faces from below it. Basically we are chopping up our terrain into segments. Now you have 2 complete halves. the next phase is the make another copy of the above water faces but it has to be a mirrored copy on the Y plane. I am not certain about which modelling softwares will do this but I am sure that many of them will. A mirrored copy is exactly what it's name implies. This cannot be an instance or something that is DEF/USEd. It has to be it's own entity with it's own indexedFaceSet. before making this copy make sure that your pivot is at dead bottom or what we will call zero. that way when you make your mirrored copy it will line up exactly with the vertice edge of the original.

(Research your own software to see if mirroring is supported)

Now that the hard part is done you put your water in the scene and the rest is Scripting technique. You wrap the mirrored copy in a Switch so that it is visible from above water. You also put the lake bottom mesh in the same Switch but it's position in the parent(switch) is 2nd so that you cannot see it initially. You then place a ProximitySensor in the water so that it completely covers the area the water covers and the top of the prox should end at the exact spot the water is at on the Y plane. Now you just make a Script so that when the ProximitySensor isActive the Switch you created is flip-flopped. The initial value of whichChoice in the Switch node is 0. When your Prox isActive the value changes to 1 and the other piece of mesh is visible instead. You can also do this in seperate Switches if there are other things you wish to hide based on the state. Underwater, the bottom of the lake will be visible and your mirrored copy will not. Above water you see your mirrored copy nthrough the surface of the water and not the bottom. You can of course play with settings of the material nodes transparency to get the the result you desire.

The scripting for this is as basic as it gets. If you want to learn about this technique I would be glad to write an example.


Although this seems like having alot of extra mesh in the scene you are really hiding one piece of it at all times so the load on rendering really isn't that great. There are other ways to get reflective effects but I like this method because you can actually see what appears to be the exact shape and definition of the landscape. Game engines can do a much cooler effect but alas that doesnt work as well with VRML.



Bruce Lehmann said:

Tha is awesome :-) How do you pull that off (remembering that I am a novice at this). Is it an inline?