# Rendering the Environment

Previous: \ref man_2_gettingstarted

All Simul’s default renderers use a right-handed co-ordinate system with x pointing East, y North, and z up. All units of distance are metres or kilometres. If not specified as km, distance is in metres. Angular units are radians, unless specified as degrees. Temperature is in kelvins, unless specified as degrees Celsius.

The Weather Renderer owns and manages renderers for sky, clouds, atmospherics and other effects. So the Weather Renderer is the main interface between your program and trueSKY.

The following table describes the elements of a sky as implemented in the supplied renderers:

Feature
Cosmic Background
Stars
Planets
Volumetric Clouds
2D Clouds
Mixed resolution rendering
Atmospherics
Godrays
Precipitation
Rain streaks

## Cosmic Background

The cosmic background texture is drawn first, at an orientation that corresponds to the plane of the Milky Way galaxy - see \link simul::sky::SkyKeyframer::SetBackgroundBrightness BackgroundBrightness\endlink.

It uses a plate-carree projection, aligned with the galactic horizon. Given the vector “view”, which is the direction in galactic co-ordinates, the calculation is:

float az       =atan2(view.y,-view.x);
vec2 texcoord  =vec2((ang/(pi*2.0)),0.5-asin(view.z)/pi);


i.e. the x coordinate is proportional to the azimuth, and the y coordinate is proportional to the elevation

\image html “MilkyWay.png” “”

You may see some stretching at the top and bottom of the image due to degeneracy of the projection, so it is preferable to have the texture fade to black at the top and bottom edges.

## Stars

Stars are drawn as point sprites, and spun around the axis of the Earth’s rotation, in the same direction as the sun. Stars are usually drawn to the highest-resolution buffer (i.e. the frame buffer or final buffer). See \link simul::sky::SkyKeyframer::SetStarBrightness StarBrightness\endlink and \link simul::sky::SkyKeyframer::SetMaxStarMagnitude MaxStarMagnitude\endlink.

## The Sun

The sun is drawn after the stars.

## Planets

Planets (e.g. the Moon) are drawn by BaseSkyRenderer. A planet texture map needs to be supplied, and the shader takes a sun direction as a parameter - this is used to light the planet (e.g. phases of the moon). Like stars, planets are usually drawn to the highest-resolution buffer, in order to make sure they have sharp outlines.

## Sky/Atmospherics

The sky and atmospherics are drawn to a volumetric texture for which the x and y axes are screen coordinates, and the z axis is distance. The final compositing step puts the sky, atmospherics and clouds to the current rendertarget.

## Clouds

Clouds are usually drawn to a pair of lower-resolution buffers. The \link simul::clouds::BaseCloudRenderer BaseCloudRenderer\endlink keeps the cloud volume textures up to date, and draws the clouds volumetrically.

## Performance

Rendering performance is chiefly dependent on the number of pixels drawn, and the number of raycasting steps (or Cloud Slices). Calculation performance - mainly cloud lighting - depends strongly on the grid size - the larger the grid, the more time will be taken to light a cloud keyframe.

## Rain and Snow

\image html “rain.jpg” “”

The \link simul::clouds::CloudKeyframe::precipitation precipitation\endlink is used to control the amount of rain or snowfall at a given time, whilst the \link simul::clouds::CloudKeyframer PrecipitationThresholdKm\endlink property is used to set the thickness of cloud required for rain to fall (setting this to 0 will allow even the smallest of clouds to produce rain). To switch between snow and rain use \link simul::clouds::CloudKeyframe rain_to_snow\endlink (where 0 is rain, 1 is snow).

Each cloud keyframe has a \link simul::clouds::PrecipitationRegion PrecipitationRegion\endlink, which defines the local area of precipitation, if it is not global for the keyframe. The amount of particles used for precipitation can be altered with the \link simul::clouds::BasePrecipitationRenderer MaxParticles\endlink property.

\image html “Lightning-RainStreaks.jpg” “”

Classes derived from simul::clouds::BasePrecipitationRenderer are used to draw the rain or snow particles, while the \link simul::clouds::PrecipitationRegion rain streak effect\endlink is drawn by the cloud renderer. This class has a property “UseSimulationTime” which determines whether rain and snow speed is based on the simulated time-of-day, or real time in seconds.