FGFS Photo Gallery
I will try to put the most recent images first. In general, the
closer you get to the bottom, the older the code was when the image
was captured.
Clouds
Sure, these aren't quite the 3D clouds of "Fly!", but they still look very
nice and have a minimal impact on frame rates.
Scenery Work
I have begun an overhaul of the current scenery system to facilitate
adding things like lakes, rivers, urban areas, other land use areas,
and eventually streams and roads. I finally got tile edge matching to
work so I have added some new images. Please note that the frame rate shown
in these images is misleading. I have a 3dfx voodoo-2 and to take a screen
shot I have to flip the card into "in-a-window-hack" mode which kills
frame rates.
Most recently, I have added "urban" areas.
Here are some screen shots from the old scenery system (without lakes
and rivers.)
Here are some additional interesting snap shots hilighting various
aspects of the Flight Gear scenery.
Night shots
Here are some snap shots which show the night sky. The Sun, Moon,
stars, and planets are all rendered in their correct position in the
sky. Flight Gear has a large star data base so the stars (and
planets) are rendered with correct magnitude (brightness.) Also, the
moon is rendered in the correct phase.
HUD and Instrument Panel Work
The Sky
- A nice pre-sunrise moon crescent. In any
sim you'd just expect the moon to be in the corrent place in the
sky with the correct phase ... right?
- Early Dusk. The sun has just set,
but the sky is still glowing. Stars aren't quite out yet.
- Later Dusk. The sun has set and
the stars are beginning to appear, but the sky is still not
completely dark.
- Night (with the Moon.) Here is an
example of the moon in the right place in the sky with the
correct phase.
- Haze at the horizon - This images demonstrates
my first attempt at making a nice sky that transitions into
haze at the horizons. It should be mostly straight forward to
make a particlar side of the sky brighter or add a pink glow on
one side to make nice sunsets and sunrises.
Sunsets
- A nice sunset - This images
demonstrates the pinkish orange glow in the sky that builds as
the sun gets lower in the sky. If you could only pan around
(and you can if you are running the binary) you would see that
the pink fades and the sky gets darker as you look towards the
other side of the sky. OpenGL is really, really cool. :-)
- Sunset over the Grand Canyon
Smooth Terrain
The following images shows how the terrain is smoothly lit underneath
the texture maps.
- Here's an example of smooth shading.
Surface normals are specified on a per-vertex basis, and OpenGL
interpolates shading across the triangle for a nice smooth
effect. Notice the mountain in the distance that is barely
visible through the nice smooth haze. :-)
- Another example. If you look
closely, you'll notice that this image has some display
artifacts at the horizon ... eventually these will get cleaned
up.
Irregular Terrain Gridding
Flight Gear uses sophisticated irregularly gridded terrain.
Irregular grids are able to achieve the same detail level as a regular
grid, but with 4-6x fewer polygons. We use a tool called Triangle
written by Jonathan R Shewchuk (Jonathan_R_Shewchuk@ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu)
to connect the dots into a Delauney triangulation.
Miscellaneous Images
The Pinals
These images attempt to compare a real photo with an image generated
by flight gear.
Last modified: 11/30/1999
Curtis L. Olson
(curt@flightgear.org)