Ambient Effects

One of the most important requirements of a 3D viewer is the possibility of rendering special ambient effects, as light properties, ambient color and fog visualization. These kind of effects are useful to simulate a real underwater environment, in order to optimize graphical viewing and to reduce far distance rendering for frame rate optimization. As an example, the fog effect can be used to mask volumetric clipping when the far clipping plane is near to the viewpoint. Ambient effects are not necessary for real working activites, but they are very useful to achieve the best graphical rendering visualization respect to best animation frame rate. The GM provides two dialog windows to perform ambient effects.

• the Ambient Options dialog let be possible to change the ambient light color and intencity, the light attenuation and the background color;
• the Fog Options dialog let be possible to choose the fog type, the fog color and its far visibility.
  

The user can choose three types of fog effects:

• haze (linear increase in opacity with distance);
• fog (exponential increase in opacity);
• smoke (exponential squared increase in opacity).