Investigation and Application of Graphics Shader Technology in Space Simulation

The progression to a programmable graphics pipeline using shaders adds numerous possibilities for realistic display of real time rendering. It is a huge amount of work to let software make full use of the capabilities of shaders, so it has to be investigated well what is possible and what can make benefit of shaders. We investigated what has been done and thought about new ways to implement certain effects for a big part of the given research areas. When starting with this project we thought we could address all aspects and implement a good deal of the desired shaders, and have them working happily together in a simple OSG demo application. This however turned out to be too optimistic and it was hard to get even a simple normal map shader working correctly in the whole environment. Apart from the numerous issues with the developing environment the theory behind the deeper computer graphics generation took a lot of time to settle down in our brains. We have learned an awful lot of this project, much more than we can put in a single document. This is mainly because of the big range we’ve worked in, that caused us not to focus on one part but keep looking at many parts, so we never really came out of the research phase. As stated in the report the shaders can be divided into three different categories, each of which actually deserves its own project. One problem is that the whole shader technology is quite young, so standardization isn’t very well spread. Especially GLSL is not extensively used and it will take some years before it is. Cg is a bit more ready for work because its design is based on adjusting the shader to the environment it must run in, instead of handling the shader source itself to the OpenGL driver. Many programs like OSG are boycotting Cg for its proprietary nature and because they would like to see a standard being well implemented instead of a software tool that compensates for lack of well implemented standards. Both shader development tools and OSG are in heavy development now. In the few months this project has taken a major new version of OSG was released, and also a major version of NVIDIA FX Composer. The first shader model 3 cards are released this year, and many experiments are going on with them. This is all very nice for research work, but isn’t easily combined with the creation of stable software. Overall we can say the shaders can be used for a lot of different aspects of visualization. From simply enhancing the visual appearance of textured models to render lunar surfaces realistically and physically correct. It is all possible.Computer GraphicsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc