andrewfarm / msbcr

3D Earth with exaggerated terrain, accurate atmospheric scattering, and animated clouds and auroras

MSBCR

By Andrew Farm
http://www.andrewofarm.com/

Introduction

MSBCR is a real-time 3D globe renderer. It is written in Java using LWJGL.

Features

• Exaggerated terrain using displacement map and normal map on adaptive level-of-detail geometry
• Shadows
• Animated clouds and auroras using Perlin noise
• Atmospheric Rayleigh scattering

Gallery

(Note: the gif framerates are lower than that of the program)

Navigation

• Scroll to zoom.
• Drag to rotate the camera around the globe.
• Use arrow keys to change the camera angle.
• Use + and - to speed up/slow down the passage of time.
• Use esc to toggle between a heliostationary and geostationary viewpoint.
• Use number keys to switch between rendering modes.
  • 1 - normal
  • 2 - HDR
  • 3 - experimental

License

This work is published under the MIT liscense.

Dependencies

MSBCR requires Java 8 and JDK 1.8.

MSBCR uses LWJGL 3.1.2 as a Java wrapper around OpenGL. The required LWJGL binaries are included in this repository in the lwjgl/ directory.

If you choose instead to download LWJGL from lwjgl.org, MSBCR uses these components:

• LWJGL core
• OpenGL bindings
• stb bindings
• JOML v1.9.3

Installation

MSBCR has been tested on macOS Sierra 10.12.5 with a 1536MB Intel Iris 6100 GPU.

MSBCR can by run by running HelloWorld.java. First you must ensure the LWJGL binaries are added to the classpath or as a user library. The way to do this varies by IDE.

Whichever platform you build MSBCR on, you must add the following to the Java VM arguments:

-Dorg.lwjgl.librarypath=lwjgl

This specifies the location of the LWJGL binaries (the lwjgl/ directory).

When running from the command line, simply run the command with this argument. In IntelliJ IDEA, the VM arguments can be edited under Run > Edit Configurations.

X Window System

On some platforms, GLFW uses the X Window System. If this is the case, you will also need to add the following VM argument in order for GLFW to work properly:

-XstartOnFirstThread

Support

MSBCR has only been tested on macOS. If you encounter any problems building or running MSBCR, please submit an issue detailing the problem.

Issues

MSBCR currently has some known issues, including:

• Incorrect viewport size on non-retina displays
• Texture glitch along prime meridian (can be fixed by splitting textures into a cubemap)
• Visible T-junctions along the edges of globe tiles at different levels of detail (can be fixed with tile skirts)
• Decreased performance rendering the atmosphere when zoomed in (shader can be optimized with a lookup table)
• Dark spots along coastlines at low levels of detail
• Subtle lighting artifacts and occasional shadow acne