org.j3d.aviatrix3d.rendering
Interface EffectRenderable

All Superinterfaces:

CascadeRenderable, java.lang.Comparable, Renderable

All Known Implementing Classes:

AmbientLight, ClipPlane, DirectionalLight, Fog, Light, PointLight, SpotLight

public interface EffectRenderable
extends CascadeRenderable

Renderable object that applies some visual effect rather than geometry.

This interface is typically combined with other renderable types to augment the geometry based on the specific object needs. This is used to control what happens to the object during the rendering pass to know how to treat this renderable. The other interfaces are used during the drawing pass to know how to paint the object on screen.

State Management

Effects can be enabled. If they are enabled they effect all geometry from their parent group and down the scene graph. When it is disabled, it will have no effect. The rendering process will ignore the group.

Effects can have two different ranges of effects - local and global. A local effect means that this node will be scoped to effect only children of the parent group that this effect is a child of (if it is a child of a SharedNode or anything that has only a single child, effectively nothing happens). A global effect will scope to the entire scene using the transformations from the root of the scene graph down to this node. This may be useful if you are creating something like a lamp where the light needs to work with all the scene's content, but is still transformed by the geometry to the light on the end of the stalk.

Scoping Rules

Because effects can be very expensive to render, and real effects don't effect everything, effects are typically limited in their rendering by scoping rules. The default scoping of effects is to only modify anything that is under the effect's parent group. Any object in a scenegraph path outside that parent group is not effected by this effect instance. Even if the effect is part of a shared scene graph, only the shared sections of the scenegraph are effected, not all of the world.

The default scoping rules can be modified through the use of several attributes of this class. They may be global, scoped to the parent grouping structure and/or limited to some specific set of bounds. A global effect will effect everything in the scenegraph for this layer. It's position is determined from the transformation heirarchy to this node (or multiples if it is part of a shared scene graph). A bounds scoping allows the user to provide an instance of a BoundingVolume object that defines how the light is to effect geometry. The bounding volume is defined in the local coordinate space of this effect. Any geometry that is potentially effected by this effect then has its bounds checked for intersection with this effect's bounds. If any part of the bounds are found to intersect, then the effect is applied to that geometry. Note that this does not imply that only the geometry that intersects with the effect's bounds has that effect applied using appearance attributes (eg enabling lighting in a Material node) - all the geometry will be effected if any part of the two bounds intersect.

Bounds and global scope can be used together. If the effect is set to global scope, and a bounds is set, then the rendering will check to see if each item of geometry intersects it's bounds with the bounds of the global effect. If there is no interesection, the effect is not applied to that geometry. If intersection occurs, the object is rendered using the global effect.

If the bounds of the effect are set to BoundingVoid, it is treated as being off, regardless of any other setting.

All effects are scoped to be local to the scene that they're included in. Effects do not bleed across layers or viewports.

Version:

$Revision: 2.6 $

Author:

Justin Couch

Method Summary

BoundingVolume	getEffectBounds() Get the current bounding volume that this light effects.
boolean	isGlobalOnly() Get the current setting of the global-only flag.

Methods inherited from interface org.j3d.aviatrix3d.rendering.CascadeRenderable

isEnabled

Methods inherited from interface org.j3d.aviatrix3d.rendering.Renderable

equals

Methods inherited from interface java.lang.Comparable

compareTo

Method Detail

isGlobalOnly

boolean isGlobalOnly()

Get the current setting of the global-only flag.

Returns:

true if for global use only, false otherwise

getEffectBounds

BoundingVolume getEffectBounds()

Get the current bounding volume that this light effects. If the light is to effect everything for infinite distance, then this will return null.

Returns:

A bounding volume if there is to be bounds, null for none.