Look good enough?

I sat down and made this DM today as the start of a preset that I've got planned and have had planned for a while now, the only problem is that I'm not sure if it actually looks believeable or not. It is a tunnel made of spheres that intersect, something like this from the side view:

 ___  ___  ___

/   \/   \/

          

\___/\___/\___  etc...

codewise it is an accurate (as accurate as DM can get anyway) raytrace of two intersecting spheres with a wrapped camera movement to make it look continuous.. however i'm not sure if it actually looks good enough for me to use or not.

opinions?

Wow, that lookes very very sweet.

Obviously it doesn't look as great as it could with a bunch of squares as the texture. This could be something very special if you put a little more work into the texture.

yeah.. that texture is just there for demonstration purposes i have a much better one in mind for the real thing. + the dm isn't finished i just want to know if it really looks enough like two intersecting spheres.

Right when you go through the connection point, it looks kinda wierd. It would help if ther was more rotation of the camera in the final DM.

nic01 also suggested i rotate the camera more during a discussion on ff, i've done that but it has meant that i've had to add another sphere to the DM and decrease the grid size to keep the fps up. i hadn't thought about doing this but it has actually stopped it from looking so weird when going through the intersection. i'm definately going to finish this preset off over the next couple of days. 🙂

check it out:

Better now. This will be great once its finished.

Much better now - before it was difficult to tell that they were spheres - now it's better. More speed would be good, and you may want to push the fadeout back a little further.

I like your coding for the three seperate spheres, you can hardly tell when a sphere wraps from the back to the front. Sometimes though the camera ends up looking off into infinity for a second then goes through the wall of the next sphere, I think that would have to do something with the wraping of the spheres. I think it would be even better if it were a little more sound reactive and move from sphere to sphere faster. I am waiting to see this preset finished.

lol,It was just a few days back when i got the same idea(but because of my lacking skills i was'nt able to make it🙁 )

Well, you'll all have to wait for Pack 9 to see the final result.

Jheriko: why not add a synched 3D SSC ring at the intersections? Could help hide the edges and would give the 'door' a bit of depth.

Some optimizations tricks:

c=2*(sqr(ox)+sqr(oy)+sqr(oz)-1);

ox,oy,oz only shift once per sphere... i'm not sure about this, but if you can spare a couple of vars you could probably speed this up by calculating this once (for every sphere) per frame rather than per pixel.

d21s1=sqrt(sqr(ox+t1*x1-cx1)+sqr(oy+t1*y1-cy1)+sqr(oz+t1*z1-cz1));

d22s1=sqrt(sqr(ox+t2*x1-cx1)+sqr(oy+t2*y1-cy1)+sqr(oz+t2*z1-cz1));

t1=if(below(d21s1,1),100,if(below(t1,0),100,t1));

t2=if(below(d22s1,1),100,if(below(t2,0),100,t2));

You can lose the square roots here 😉. In general, when comparing distances, just compare the squares... here it doesn't matter because you're comparing with 1.

Oh and normally because of the way the quadratic equation for a sphere it built-up, you can always pick out one of the two solutions, because one will always be the backfacing point, the other the front-facing point.

Just make sure you save several copies of this preset (I noticed you have the same filename for both). I've lost a bunch of stuff like this. It never hurts to backup and save every 10 minutes. After every major change, I keep a 'last good' version before trying something else.

As far as realism goes, it's really up to you to make it look as convincing as possible: the raytracing is correct, there's nothing to change about that. One thing I would play with is fog. You could use exponential decay, inverse decay, inverse square decay (with a minor negative offset to guarantee zero visibility at a certain distance).

thanks for the tips... i've already removed the sqrts and i spotted a bug in the camera movement. I might add an SSC ring if I can be bothered.. but I've got really sick of this preset now.