Currentl I am working on some experiments with scene layouts that can encompass the following:
Outdoor:
- Terrain (heigthmap or mesh)
- Skybox
- Static Meshes for Trees/Buildings/etc that are laid out in mini towns around the terrain.
Indoor:
- Mesh for caves or Mesh for dungeons
Currently my interest is in figuring out the best method for handling Outdoor. I dont wish to make a huge mesh with the terrain, buildings, etc in one giant polygon soup since its rather unweildy. Current thoughts are having a custom scene node for the terrain that will be rendered using either geomipmapping or a quadtree. The buildings and trees I was thinking of a second scene node that is a quadtree that does not break the quadtree down into polygons but uses their bounding boxes as the elements in the quadtree. This would mean if a building was in a node the entire thing would get drawn. This allows me to remove huge numbers of polygons fast as I can drop entire buildings, but it also means the buildings are a bruteforce render (may want to Octree or BSP the buildings to help that).
My question really is, does this sound reasonable and is it reasonable to create these 2 scenenodes, or would it be better to have 1 Scene node that handles both Terrain and the static objects in one pass (aka Render the terrain then the statics through the onrender method in my own scenenode). I like the idea of breakign it up into 2 scene nodes since it is less messy, but wanted to see if others thought this was reasonable.
Also on a side note, are there any good examples out there with custom scene nodes that use relatively complex meshes, multiple textures/materials etc?
Thanks,
Chris
Opinion requested on structuring scenes
You can do what most mmorpg's that use large terrain scapes do and break each landblock into it's own mesh and then load/unload them per need.
A semi-example of this is http://www.saigumi.net/archives/000027.html and http://www.saigumi.net/archives/000021.html.
Asheron's Call does this on a larger scale. The landblocks are less defined at a greater distance and don't have child objects like tree/rocks/houses/monsters drawn. When the landblock is 2 miles or less away, more detail is loaded as well as the objects on those tiles.
It may not be a multi-texture mesh, but the Terrain demo on the tutorials page on the main irrlicht site is a complex custom scene node.
A semi-example of this is http://www.saigumi.net/archives/000027.html and http://www.saigumi.net/archives/000021.html.
Asheron's Call does this on a larger scale. The landblocks are less defined at a greater distance and don't have child objects like tree/rocks/houses/monsters drawn. When the landblock is 2 miles or less away, more detail is loaded as well as the objects on those tiles.
It may not be a multi-texture mesh, but the Terrain demo on the tutorials page on the main irrlicht site is a complex custom scene node.
Crud, how do I do this again?
stampsm, maybe you should post a howto in the howto forum, and a link here.
ceisnaugle, not quite.
currently there are different 'materials', including alpha, lightmap, and reflectance, as well as some others. perhaps one of these will suit your needs.
if not-- perhaps you can extend the materials to include what you need, otherise, no.
ceisnaugle, not quite.
currently there are different 'materials', including alpha, lightmap, and reflectance, as well as some others. perhaps one of these will suit your needs.
if not-- perhaps you can extend the materials to include what you need, otherise, no.
a screen cap is worth 0x100000 DWORDS