nXng is a realtime 3D engine. What this mean is that when
you render a picture in Lightwave it can take several minutes to complete.
When running nXng each picture you see is rendered on the
fly so, each frame must take a very short amount of time to render if
we want the animation to work. Of course this imply a very important reduction
of image quality... Speed versus Quality... ):
1.0]
Rendering considerations & limitations:
There are many things that get dropped out from Lightwave render to nX
render, among these:
- Phong shading is no more possible only flat or gouraud shading are fast
enough to be of use in realtime. However true static phong shading is
available via Lightmaps,
- Dynamic shadows are also very time consuming... therefore realtime 3d
engine almost never include support for them. nX uses Lightmaps to reduce
the gap beetwen realtime and rendered pictures. With lightmaps very realistic
static shadows can be reproduced along with true phong shading.
- Edge antialiasing is also unsupported in nX. This is subject to change
soon...
Apart from these major lacks nXng has a powerful implementation of all available realtime techniques from today's 3D hardware. So you will almost always get a render very similar of what you could expect if you keep in mind the above restrictions.
nXng will very soon get its software renderer back. It won't be a hardware emulation anymore but a realtime raytracer! Of course this is kinda slow but has CPUs gets faster and faster this is the way to go...
1.1]
Automatic scene sizing & Z-Buffering problems
3D hardware now always support Z-buffering to enable realistic polygon
intersection to be accurately reproduced. However for speed considerations
this Z-buffer has hardware-defined limitations. Z-Buffer usually fits
in 16 or 32 bit on common 3D accelerators. For 3D hardware using 32 bit
Z-buffer there should be no problem with automatic scene sizing. But 16
Z-buffer may exhibit flickering polygons or crappy polygons intersections.
To determine if your hardware has 16 or 32 bit Z-buffer support just launch
a scene and exit it then look in nX Console the Z-buffer format that was
used for replaying.
The following also apply to Z-buffer problems:
To
avoid potential problems with Zcutting, the scene is scaled at load time
to conform with it GridSize setting. If you encounter Z-Clipping problems,
try modifying the Scene's GridSize in Layout! OPTIONS Menu / Layout View
/ Grid Square Size.
Watch your scene in Layout because if this problem arise in nX it is most
likely to be the same in Layout.
Also sometimes extreme values (like 1Gm) can make the BoundingBox system
go nuts making loads of polygons weirdly getting all over the screen.
-
Lightmaps dramatically improve visual quality -
-
Static shadows can be accurately reproduced -
