Visibility

[bluefall]

Hi all,

I have been digging for solutions but I just don't seem to be able to solve it! I am sure it is something simple!

I am creating a movie using the WC3 World Editor. My problem is that in any scene that I create I (or the camera I guess) can only see a limited part of the map. Everything outside of these bounds is dark/black. I can still see the wather ripple effects in the dark. It is important for the story that the viewer can see a larger part of the map
I have looked at some the suggestions of other posts, but none of them seem to solve my problem.
I tried: disable black mask, create an initially visibility modifier for (player 1), emitting visibility across (entire map), disable fog of war, extend camera bounds, but nothing works.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Dr Super Good]

Try setting the camera far Z. If that does not work then try disabling fog (not fog of war, environmental fog used to hide the far Z clipping plain). If that does not work then WC3 does not support what you are after.

 

[bluefall]

Thank very much Dr Super Good, I appreciate your comment.

I did have a Go at these things apart from 'environmental fog' - Did you mean the fog in 'Action - Reset fog'? The far Z didn't solve my issue unfortunately.

I hope it's ok to post an image here, just to show what I mean:

Look at the trees in the back; the front ones are in light, but the ones in the back are in the dark. You can only see the silhouettes. I would want everything to be visible, at least as far as the map goes.

 

[Emm-A-]

I searched a lot for a solution to this as well but unfortunately, it seems like this "darkness" is somehow hard-coded as even setting the far Z to over 10.000 does not help.
Please someone, prove me wrong

Have you thought about making everything tinier? I know it sucks, but if there is no other solution this may work...

 

[Dr Super Good]

It is clearly some kind of environmental fog by the way things get darker the further they are. This was fairly common in old games to hide the fact they had limited view distance. It only really went out of popularity with the xbox360/ps3 generation where big environments were suddenly possible.

Could you post a test map easily showing this problem in game? Maybe it can be turned off some how. However I do not recall anyone doing so.

 

[bluefall]

Hi all, thanks for your replies.
I think it may really have something to do with the cameras bounds. I have uploaded a sample map here and I placed two cameras in the map. When it changes from one camera to another, you can clearly see how the darkness moves with the camera. But I have tried to manipulate the camera boundaries to no avail.
I have added all sorts of things that I could think of in the action log of this sample map, maybe there is something else you can think of?.

 

[Dr Super Good]

My first reply contained the solution. Disable environmental fog by setting it to practically never cut in (start distance 9999, end distance 10000). Can be done in GUI as the fixed map shows (press ESC to see).

Do note that there is a hard-coded far-Z maximum on cameras of 10,000. It does not seem possible to exceed this limit. Even using JASS to input a value beyond 10,000 does not work as the interpolation logic is correct for the larger value but cut-off still occurs at 10,000. The environmental fog exists to try and mask the far-Z cut-off so objects do not appear to cut-in.

 

[bluefall]

OMG Dr Super Good, you just made my day. I have been battling with this issue for so long! Thank you so much, that's exactly what I wanted. I can live without the objects being seen, probably won't use many anyway. As long I can see into the 'country-side' I am good. now I can finally continue on my movie

Thanks again!