Denmark
Joined: Jul 7, 2013
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Re: Hither and yon?
Well... It seems that what you have done is to adjust the preview, so that it resembles what you get when creating pictures in Q1 and Q2. The problem now is that it's very difficult to compose sceneries for Q3 and Q4 images.
Examples:
V5.3
V5.5b
As you can see from the second screenshot, we can no longer preview the placement and size of distant objects, such a horizon or a distant city, or other elements that will be quite visible in Q3 and Q4.
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
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Re: Hither and yon?
There's no frustrum in rendering quality 3 and 4, that's why the rendered image is black as soon as the camera is placed in a wall. But at the opposite, the image because very noisy if the elevation of the camera is very high, and that's the reason why I limited it to 100 m.
With OpenGL (i.e. in the 3D view and at quality 1 and 2), the changes I programmed should give more predictable and usable results: when the camera is within the (approximated) bounding box which contains all the items of the scene, the front clip distance (hither) is 2,5 cm and the back clip distance (yon) is 3000 x 2,5 = 75 m (3000 is a recommended ratio between those distances). When the camera is out of that bounding box (which is not the last case you submitted), the front distance is equal to the distance between the camera and the closest face of that box, or if it's smaller, the distance between the camera and the floor at the intersection of the floor and the bottom of the viewing frustrum. The back clip distance is normally 3000 farther, except if there's some chances that the horizon is cut too close of the camera. I could make a drawing if necessary to explain this rule. How to apply this new rule in your case: don't create a scenery object that will surround the camera completely, so you're sure that you can place the camera out of that scenery box. The farther the camera will be of that box, the larger the front and back clip distances will be. For example, if you want the back clip distance to be equal to 450 m, you should be at 450 / 3000 = 0,15 m = 15 cm of the box. This is not so far!
Hope you can achieve what you want to do with these new rules and without the obligation to add in a future version some new fields to enter the front and/or back clip distances. I really feel that this kind of information isn't for the public primarily targeted by Sweet Home 3D.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
Denmark
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Re: Hither and yon?
@Puybaret
I have a feeling I should never have brought this up, since the adjustments you made went totally in the wrong direction (for me).
Anyway, up until recently I have been able to use 5.3 for constructing and rendering bigger sceneries. But if I want to take advantage of the new features introduced in later versions ( texture handling, rotation, lighting etc.), I can not use V5.3.
A preview in v5.3 can look like this:
In v5.7, however, a preview will look like this:
which makes it somewhat challenging to compose a nice picture, having to more or less guess what my composition will look like.
Of course I can still use 5.3 it to compose my pictures, and then copy the coordinates of the virtual visitor manually from 5.3 to 5.7, and render it with the correct texturing:
But it's a time consuming process going back and forth, opening heavy project files.
As you are pointing out: this has no interest for "the public primarily targeted by Sweet Home 3D". Exactly; so I'm just wondering: Do you think the public primarily targeted by Sweet Home 3D would notice any difference if you were to change the frustrum back to what it was in v 5.3?
Actually, I discovered that most graphics cards (maybe even all?) support a Z-buffer of 24 bit, therefore I forced the Z-buffer bits to 24 instead of the default value of 16, and this nicely resolved the issue. It will even optimize a little the rendering speed when the point of view changes, because less computing is required with a larger Z-buffer!
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
