Clip plane'd cubemaps

Hi all,
Not sure if this is the right place to post this but I have been asked to let it out anyway, so here it is:

This demonstrates how to use tom's DX7 dll to fix the water intersection problems with cubemaps:

Here's the code:

http://damientsturdy.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/clipdemo.zip

Screenshot:



Hope some find it helpful.

Thanks to Tom for the DLL and Big10p for the clip plane code I turned into this :)


[edit]

Man, my English is *AWFUL*

Very useful contribution, thanks. I guess this is useful for a LOT of things, like mirrors, cubemapping, water refraction fx, depth of field etc.

Thanks, this will surely be very useful to a lot of people.

i get "function setsystemproperties not found"

Nice!

Put the dll and decals in the userlibs folder Pete.

Pete make sure the include files and the decls files are located correctly.

Just tried it: works properly. wow, after all correctly working mirrors using CreateMirror() !!! I've been missing this many times.

Yup, Make sure you install the userlib.

You should be fine if you have already got a newer DX7 dll installed :)

jfk, Yup, I used this when working on a dragon demo. there are some screenies floating around somewhere. It really makes a difference :D

You're not kidding - I wish we'd had this for that water thread... nearly drove me nuts doing a nearside clip manually! Won't ever have to go there again. :D

It has brought something a bit worrying to my attention, though - cubemapping does not seem to work on my laptop. It's got an integrated chipset that a lot of potential customers will have so I think it's something for folk to be aware of. Links to cubemapping examples would be nice... I've tried two so far and both fail.

looks lovely, I don't understand what you are talking about, but it's nice.

It boils down to reflections being a big fat cheat. If you think about what a reflected view is...

Cam
   \        /Light
     \    /
       \/(Boing!)
- - - - - - - - - - - Water

...it becomes quickly clear that, rather than trace the light for each pixel you can just bung another camera in with an inverse pitch...

Cam
   +        /Light
     +    /
       +/
- - - - - - - - - - - Water
     /
   /
 /
Cam2

The problem arises when you have something either partially or totally immersed in the water, because now the camera that generates our reflections will see things it should not...

Cam
   +        /Light
     +    /
       +/
- - - - - - - - - - - Water
     / 
  ***** <-Hello, what's this?
 /
Cam2

And this is why clip-planes are so lovely. Now you can tell the camera not to render things on either the near side of the clip plane or the far side. Stick a clip plane where the water plane is and Cam2 can now ignore anythng below the surface, giving a more accurate reflection...

            /Light
          /
        /
- - - - - - - - - - - Water
                      <-
                      <-Nowt rendered. Top banana!
                      <-
Cam2

OK I *totally* get it now thanks :-) Great diagrams btw.