Canvas view camera element

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Cquote1.png It would make sense to integrate all efforts (CompositeViewer, Canvas and Compositor) to create a Canvas Element that can render an arbitrary view.

Some time ago I wrote what I think are the required steps to get something like cockpit mirrors working: #Roadmap

The main showstopper was having CompositeViewer Support, but since that effort is underway, all the parts are there for someone willing to dive in.


— Fernando García Liñán  (2020-08-20 14:27:58). Independent view windows.
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Cquote2.png
Canvas Camera Views
Cvcanvas-777.jpeg
Started in 11/2020
Description Rendering arbitrary scene views to a texture/Canvas
Maintainer(s) none
Contributor(s) Cgdae, Icecode
Status experimental prototype

Background

Several aircraft developers have manifested their interest in being able to render scene views to a texture (RTT) Render target This is a link to a Wikipedia article and use it inside cockpits as mirrors, external cameras (so called tail cams) and other uses.

With the Compositor framework it's possible to configure custom render pipelines in XML space, which together with Effect schemes allow complete control over how a rendered scene looks. A synthetic terrain can be rendered by assigning an Effect scheme to a scene type pass, which textures all terrain with a brown checkerboard pattern and paints the sky in a solid blue color. All other objects are ignored and aren't rendered, saving a lot of computation time. Custom render distances independent from the main LOD settings can also be used to further optimize the performance of the display.[1]

Use Cases

  • Tail Cams (gear view)
  • Mirrors
  • Dynamic in-sim view configuration
  • On demand creation of views and windows (e.g. FGCamera previews)
  • Missile/payload views
  • Prototyping/testing HUDs or PFDs requiring synthetic terrain to work properly
  • rendering an orthographic view to implement moving maps that render actual FlightGear terrain/DEM

Proof of Concept

1rightarrow.png See Hackathon Proposal: CompositeViewer and Canvas for the main article about this subject.


Roadmap

Use CompositeViewer

80}% completed

Currently FlightGear uses only one instance of osg::Viewer, which is used by CameraGroup to manage the slave cameras. Supporting CompositeViewer would require modifying flightgear/src/Viewer/fg_os_osgviewer.cxx and creating some kind of wrapper class that manages the CompositeViewer instance and assigns a CameraGroup to each osg::View. It's also important to note that currently all FG subsystems assume there is a single instance of CameraGroup.

Standardize the View manager

Note  Jules has already created a custom view manager implementation (Sview) that supports multiple independent instances, so this step might be obsolete by now.

The first step would be to port the view code to SimGear so it can be used and known by the Compositor and Canvas. The view manager (flightgear/src/Viewer/viewmgr.cxx) currently has some hardcoded assumptions, so it would either need to be rewritten to remove them or a new interface for the Views could be created specifically for the Canvas Camera View.

In FlightGear, the Canvas system (which resides in SimGear) is integrated using the equivalent of a FGCanvasSystemAdapter, which provides all FG APIs to SimGear and makes the Canvas system available inside FG: flightgear/src/Canvas/FGCanvasSystemAdapter.cxx

Instead of using tied properties, the adapted view code would either used propertyObject<> or the propertyBasedMgr abstraction, so that the corresponding canvas element can continue to use well-known conventions to manipulate views: (flightgear/src/Viewer/view.cxx)

Create a Canvas Element subclass Pending Pending

30}% completed

This derived class would require the following configuration:

  • Compositor to use.
  • Scene graph to use. By default the main scene graph would be used, but an arbitrary XML file can be loaded to render a custom model. A typical use-case would be instruments that need to manipulate/render a 3D object (for which we have working code, too)
  • View to use. This could be one of the "main" ones (i.e. the ones on the main property tree), or a locally-defined one that is only known to this Canvas Element (think FLIR).

Several optimization/miscellaneous parameters exposed in the form of properties per element, like:

Simplifying a lot, this Canvas Element would be an aggregation of:

  • a Compositor instance / effect scheme
  • a View
  • a pointer to a osg::Group representing the scene graph to render (e.g. alias or filename based).

This setup could be replicated in flightgear/src/Viewer/fg_os_osgviewer.cxx, with the difference of ignoring Canvas and using native windowing features from OSG (see Jules' fgcommands to clone a view and open a dedicated GraphicsContext/window).

Related

Forum topics

References

References