Shading

Plant Modeller can produce a shaded picture of the model as seen in any of the currently open views. The shaded picture temporarily occupies the window where the wireframe picture is drawn and stays there until the program needs to redraw the original view.

There are several user settable parameters controlling shading. When computing illumination the light source is considered to be at infinity.

Shade

Select the view you want to be shaded. Shading uses the default parameters.

Configure shades

Specify how to generate an old style shaded image of a wireframe view. You should create views as shaded to allow OpenGL to take care of the shading.

The following settings are asked:

Number of colors in shading

The panel for this command allows varying the number of different solid colors used and the number of brightness of each color when you have a pseudo-color display. These displays can only show 256 different colors at the same time, though each of these colors is adjustable. It is necessary to limit the number of colors in order to get more shades, since the total number of all shades of all colors is so limited. Too few shades will give a tiled effect. The number of colors determines how many "base colors" are to be used. You can have decent looking pictures when you use 6 colors and 36 shades for each. The RGB (red, green and blue) triples for these base colors are loaded from the color configuration

If your workstation supports "true color" display (15, 16 or 24 bits per pixel) then the above described limitations with respect to the number of colors do not apply. In this case Plant Modeller can use 256 different base colors and brightness values vary between 0 and 65535. The depth of the frame buffer then determines how many different brightness values can actually be displayed for each base color.

Number of shades per color

Normally a 3D object is shaded with the same colors used in the wireframe picture. If the number of colors used in shading is less than those used in the wireframe picture then some colors will be reused.

Minimum intensity

Each shading color will have a certain number of different shades computed by varying the values of red, green, and blue through the range of intensities. Internally intensities are scaled from a settable minimum to a maximum of 1.0. Normally the minimum is not zero since that would make the dark side of objects totally black. Minimums in the range of 0.2 to 0.4 will give an omnidirectional ambient light

Draw outlines

When the Draw Outlines flag is set to 1 and hidden lines are removed from the view to be shaded then Plant Modeller draws the wireframe picture after shading onto the shaded view. This can give extra contrast to edges.

Shading parameters are stored permanently into the application defaults file when you exit the system with the "Save" command.

Direction to light source

This command can be used to change the direction for the (simulated) light source for shaded views. The same direction is used for all shaded views.