SkyWorks Real-Time Cloud Rendering Demo Mark J. Harris University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill email: harrism@cs.unc.edu http://www.cs.unc.edu/~harrism/clouds Updated May 3, 2002 SKYWORKS v0.01a SkyDemoReadme.txt This demo demonstrates real-time rendering of realistically illuminated volumetric clouds. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RUNNING THE DEMO To run the demo, run one of the following .bat files: RunSingleCloud.bat - a single cloud. Demonstrates anisotropic scattering. RunSmall.bat - a field of 36 clouds. See below for controls. RunLarge.bat - a field of 51 clouds. See below for controls. RunValley.bat - a field of clouds over a valley. See compatibility note below. NOTE: RunValley.bat requires an NVIDIA graphics card. The reason is that currently, the demo relies on an NVIDIA extension to accelerate the rendering of the large terrain (the Vertex Array Range extension). I may add support for ATI's equivalent extension (Vertex Array Object) in the near future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DEMO CONTROLS The demo launches in flight mode. You pilot the biplane with the mouse and keyboard. The flight is not intended to be realistic. Controls: Mouse: up-down = pitch right-left = roll Keyboard: 'a','d' = yaw (left, right) 'w','s' = throttle (up, down) To toggle between flight and free-look mode, press the spacebar. Free look mode keys: 'z' = switch to "trackball" mode. 'x' = switch to "Drive" mode. 'c' = switch to "Pan" mode. 'v' = switch to "Look" mode. General Demo Keys: '\' = toggle wireframe display of scene lights. '|' = toggle wireframe display of cloud bounding volume tree. '[' = decrease camera follow distance. ']' = increase camera follow distance. '{' = decrease camera spring length. '}' = increase camera spring length. ',' = decrease camera spring constant. '.' = increase camera spring constant. '<' = decrease camera spring damping. '>' = increase camera spring damping. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SYSTEMS TESTED: I have run this demo on NVIDIA GeForce cards and ATI Radeon 8500 cards. The demo has worked fine on these systems: Intel PIII 800MHz, NVIDIA GeForce 2 (64MB) Intel PIII 800MHz, ATI Radeon 8500 (64MB) Intel P4 Xeon 1.7GHz (dual), ATI Radeon 8500 (64MB) Intel P4 2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 3 (64MB) Intel PIII 1GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4400 (128MB) Intel P4 2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Laptop: Toshiba Satellite PIII 1GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 2 Go (16MB). This system has inconsistent frame rates due to the low amount of video memory, but otherwise it runs OK. The single cloud demo runs fine. KNOWN ISSUES: Display Color Depth: SkyWorks needs 32 bit color to run properly. If your display is set to less than this (16 bit is common), SkyWorks will report a warning at startup. Currently it runs quite slowly in 16 bit mode. I am unsure why. I suggest you switch your display settings to 32 bits. To do so, open the Display control panel, and select the settings tab. Then select "True Color (32 bit)" in the "Colors" drop- down list box. QUESTIONS / PROBLEMS: Email Mark Harris at harrism@cs.unc.edu