Experiment: real rain effect

[ksgy]

Hi,

 

I really miss a proper rain effect on windshield in X-Plane. There's something if you have a 2D cockpit, but most of the new planes comes with 3D cockpit and none of them so far has kind-of-a-real rain effect. It's tricky and/or resource heavy to calculate the raindrops. But since we can hack around OpenGL directly as a texture we might have a solution.

 

This is done in WebGL:

http://tympanus.net/Development/RainEffect/

 

Sadly I don't have time at the moment to pick this up and kick start the development but if somebody is interested, could be a good starting point

If nobody picks up in the upcoming months, I might have time to do this when finished with the v1.0 of the Let L-410.

 

 

[JGregory]

It's just NOT that simple.

[sundog]

People have written entire thesis on this problem. It's not simple at all.

 

But if anyone does tackle it, here are some papers I came across when I had to do something similar for a client:

 

http://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~whmin/Zhang-2012-DMS/Zhang-2012-DMS.pdf

 

http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/kin/publications/CA93/wdroplet.pdf

 

http://imagine.kicbak.com/blog/?p=124

 

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/268438621_Animation_of_Water_Droplets_on_a_Hydrophobic_Windshield

 

After about two weeks' worth of work I came up with this:

 

http://media.sundog-soft.com/ForMak/raindrops.mp4

 

And, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Edited November 4, 2015 by sundog

[mano]

 ?

[Cameron]

 ?

 

That looks somewhat terrible.

[mano]

it accelerated ..

[Cameron]

it accelerated ..

 

Only the first part is. Doesn't take away from the fact that not only does it look awful, it's also not released it seems.

[ksgy]

I know it's not that simple, but could be a good starting point, since this is the most realistic generated raindrops I ever seen

 

Thanks for the papers! I had a quick look and now I know what you mean by "not that simple"

 

People have written entire thesis on this problem. It's not simple at all.

 

But if anyone does tackle it, here are some papers I came across when I had to do something similar for a client:

 

http://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~whmin/Zhang-2012-DMS/Zhang-2012-DMS.pdf

 

http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/kin/publications/CA93/wdroplet.pdf

 

http://imagine.kicbak.com/blog/?p=124

 

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/268438621_Animation_of_Water_Droplets_on_a_Hydrophobic_Windshield

 

After about two weeks' worth of work I came up with this:

 

http://media.sundog-soft.com/ForMak/raindrops.mp4

 

And, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

[Ben Russell]

...and then, once you figure out all the not simple details of drawing and physics, you have to try and shoe horn/squeeze/cram/stuff that into x-planes incredibly limited possibilities for actually letting you SEE the texture and effects, which usually has an awesome side effect like ruining the alpha channels of something like clouds, glass, or buildings or whatever... plenty of historical bugs out there on this.

 

We're not ignorant of these effects and things like spherical reflection mapping.

 

We don't do "it" because we're fully aware of all the horrible compromises that have to be made.

[ksgy]

That's just... sad

[Airbus]

Someday we'll have scenes like this.

[Onevim]

Have any of you played the latest grand theft auto game? It's got fantastic rain effects that look VERY real. I wonder what techniques they use and whether the same techniques can be brought to x-plane, either as a plugin or included with the stock sim.