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Back to Graphics and GPU Programming

Clip planes for large planet rendering

george7378 · 2020-04-25T13:30:55

Hi everyone, I've got a question about how to set the clip planes for my camera when rendering real-scale planets. I think I've got most things figured out (render the scene with camera at the origin, store large positions as doubles then convert to float for rendering) but this is still confusing me. Most people seem to say that you should set the far clip to a manageable value (e.g. 10,000) and then scale the planet down, but how does this work when I'm actually at the surface? If the camera's only 1m away, then scaling down the planet by, say, 1000x will make this equivalent to 1km. Then I'd have to move the near plane closer by a factor of 1000 to compensate for it, and the ratio between near and far makes the whole scaling thing pointless. Any ideas of examples how I can render a planet while still being able to sit ~1m above the surface without clipping it out? Thanks!