New planet object: share your thoughts

[morbid]

Hello everyone!

We're finishing our planet object and would like to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the workflow and functionality. Below you'll find a link on a survey. 

UNIGINE's Planet Survey

[janis.taranda]

Hey what a planet Object? Where can I check it out?

[silent]

It's not ready yet and planned to introduce later for Unigine Sim editions only.

[janis.taranda]

3 minutes ago, silent said:

It's not ready yet and planned to introduce later for Unigine Sim editions only.

Sim only, thats sad :(

[Ugly1-1]

Late to the party on this one. What is a PlanetObject?  In my head it suggests a kind of plane (or multiple planes) wrapped around a geo-model on which materials can be applied, or Landscape layers. Something we definitely have a use case for. 

[binstream]

2 hours ago, Ugly1-1 said:

Late to the party on this one. What is a PlanetObject?  In my head it suggests a kind of plane (or multiple planes) wrapped around a geo-model on which materials can be applied, or Landscape layers. Something we definitely have a use case for. 

The mesh-based version is already working internally. The tricky parts are: procedural content generation (Landscape Tool v2), manual content editing (placing tools, etc.), integration with water, atmosphere, physics (gravity vector), controls (moving along an ellipsoid).

[ashtorak]

What's the status of this or did this turn into the Round Earth Cesium Plugin here? If so, what's the status of this? :)

I am wondering, because I have been playing around with a simple real size earth, but it has a lot of problems. So a ready made solution would be perfect. 

One of the issues is that there can only be a far clipping plane of 2000 km when keeping near clipping at 0.1 m to not have camera black out (why does it do this btw?). So, if I had an object like a space station in higher orbits and want to look out of the window to see the whole earth I have to increase near clipping, which soon gets noticeable, especially at higher FOVs. It would not be a super big problem for me right now. But in general, this clipping plane thing seems to limit the advantage of having double precision quite a bit or am I missing something here?

[silent]

Cesium plugin is currently on hold and we are looking for more robust approach.

Quote

One of the issues is that there can only be a far clipping plane of 2000 km when keeping near clipping at 0.1 m to not have camera black out (why does it do this btw?).

This issue is not related with double precision, but rather with inverse-Z depth precision (camera znear / zfar). If you want to render a planet in a full scale and at the same time have camera near some object on orbit you would need to use two cameras and combine them (first camera is rendering near object and second one is rendering a planet).

[ashtorak]

Thanks! I haven't yet worked with multiple cameras on my small Unity games at least not in this way. So I guess, something new to try :)

I also did a quick google search about z buffer precision, but there is not much to find about anyone wanting to go beyond 32 bit versions. Not too surprising maybe as there really is just this one use case.

[devrom]

@ashtorak
This could be an interesting read for you: https://dexyfex.com/2016/07/11/galaxia-the-basics-coordinates/