For example, an environment that supports day and night effects will give a much more dramatic look to a model than a simple environment that does not contain an ephemeris model. Similarly, fog effects and cloud shadows add to the realism of the final result. While Vega Prime supports all of the environmental effects that I just mentioned, one that had been missing up until now is the ability to have objects, buildings and terrain elements cast dynamic shadows in their virtual world. Vega Prime 3.0, which has just been released, addresses this need with the introduction of a new capability to its Shadows module that renders Dynamic Shadows at runtime during its execution.

Since an image often speaks more than words, the following three screenshots show a 3D scene with shadows enabled displayed in the morning, the same scene displayed in the evening and the scene in the evening without shadows. It is easy to see from these pictures that shadows make all of the elements stand out even more than before.

In this first screenshot, notice how fine details like the shadow of the electrical wires can be seen on the ground on the right-hand side of the frame.

This next screenshot really shows how all elements of the scene are considered when calculating shadows. For example, we can clearly see how buildings are casting shadows on adjacent structures.  

This last snapshot was taken at the same time as the previous shot but without rendering the shadows and lets us see what was added to the quality of the scene rendering.  

To make it even more appealing, the new dynamic shadows feature is extremely easy to setup in just a few minutes. All that needs to be done is to create a new ShadowsDynamicShadows object instance in your LynX Prime configuration file, to associate the new element with the channel where it should perform its extra rendering and finally to select the desired quality and distance parameters for the shadows. While these pictures are already breathtaking, seeing the shadows move as the time of day changes is just amazing.

You can watch a demonstration video of the feature by clicking here.

 For existing Vega Prime customers, be sure to try out this new feature when you upgrade to the new version.