Dynamic shadows ?

[djdesmangles]

Hello everybody !!!

I'm a beginner in Vizard, but I also have some experience in Virtools (htt://www.virtools.com). Actually, I'm on "migration", giving up on Virtools to embrace Vizard and I've some little questions...

1- How can I manage dynamic shadows in Vizard ?
2- Is Vizard supporting HDR ?

Thanks a lot,
D.

[tobin]

Welcome to Vizard!

Re shadows: Vizard R2 does not have dynamic shadows but we are working hard right now to make it part of the final R3 release. Since it is still very much in the works it hasn't made it into the R3 beta releases yet. More than that we can't say yet.

There's no HDR support per se but Vizard has quite a few plug-ins and R3 makes it even easier than before to build your own shaders. What type of HDR support are you inquiring about?

[djdesmangles]

Hello ,

Thanks for the quick answers... Too bad for the shadows I'll wait for the R3... about the HDR support, it's because I did not find any topics about it...

I'm still digging...

See ya !!

[tobin]

I didn't mean to imply that you'll find much on HDR in the docs or on our website. But if you describe what HDR methods in particular you're interested in, then maybe we have something internally that you'd find useful. You're welcome to email support@worldviz.com instead of posting to the public forum.

[k_iwan]

@ Tobin;

This topic has caught interest. Is HDR actually possible in Vizard via plug in? is there an example or how to do this in vizard? do we need to actually produce our own .HDR from multiple exposure photographs or could we simply get away with .jpg files or even a skybox?

In what new section of the help file there is a mention of "Depth Map Occlusion", is there a demo for this feature?

All the best in developing vizardR3!!!!

Regards,
Iwan

[tobin]

HDR is a broad term, but specifically what it can mean in Vizard is the ability to build a shader that can write to floating point buffers. By that definition, yes, Vizard supports HDR shaders. Vizard R3 also can load .HDR files as texture maps (see below). Currently there are no samples that I can provide you to demonstrate either the shader or texture map functionality.

image = viz.addtexture('file.hdr')

A good article on the topic of HDR and tone mapping is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging


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Regarding depth occlusion maps, I've attached a demo script that shows this functionality. The included depthmap.dlm is built for R3.

[k_iwan]

@ Tobin:

Thank you. I will try to create a vizard Scene with a HDR image. I will post any interesting result.

As for the depth map demo, It's Impressive to see it in real-time. This is similar to what I refer as alpha masking, except that it uses no alpa but a .bmp file.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Iwan