Community Papermint Designs

In our new OpenGL tutorial, we want to demonstrate several interesting techniques of real-time procedural planet rendering: Screen space atmospheric light scattering (both Rayleigh and Mie); Basic cloud rendering (cloud layers) combined with light scattering; Procedural planetary surface generation (both color and geometry) based on noise and detail textures; Three different planetary surface rendering techniques depending on the actual planet-to-camera-distance: Long, Medium and Short distance rendering.

Sundog Software released version 2.7 of its SilverLining Sky, 3D Cloud, and Weather SDK today, rolling out several new visual effects for game and simulation developers. SilverLining supports OpenGL 2.0+ based engines, and OpenGL ES 2.0 under Android. SilverLining 2.7 adds crepuscular rays (God-rays), beams of light emanate from the sun when it’s behind clouds, leading to visually stunning scenes with no extra effort from the developer.

For years Tao Framework was the most popular .NET binding for OpenGL and many other multimedia-related libraries, but unfortunately the project became abandoned some time around 2008, leaving its last release supporting OpenGL 2.1 only. In 2012, based on the same design philosophy and the latest source code of Tao Framework, development was picked up once again by a different staff but with the same goal - to provide 1:1 bindings to OpenGL for .NET and Mono. The currently supported OpenGL version in Tao Classic is 4.3.

The nopper.tv website now also hosts OpenGL ES 3.0 examples. After porting GLUS to OpenGL ES 3.0, there are now 14 OpenGL ES 3.0 examples available. Currently, the examples only run under Windows, but a Linux port is also planned.

Drishti (version 2.2) Windows, MacOSX and Linux binaries are now available for download at the google code site. This volume exploration and presentation tool runs on GPUs having OpenGL 2.0 or higher capability. Drishti-2.2 includes bug fixes and many newer additions such as 16-bit volume handling, access to itk filters via plugins and much more. A complete list of changes is available at the google code site. Drishti allows scientists to visualize, explore and present volumetric datasets. Help videos are available on our youtube channel. More help videos will be added in coming days. Join the Drishti User Group.