Proposal: Consolidate SkyAtmosphere and Globe atmosphere settings?

[ptrgags]

As I'm looking into #4196, one thing I notice is that the following settings exist on both viewer.scene.skyAtmosphere (for the sky) and viewer.scene.globe (for ground and fog for terrain):

• atmosphereBrightnessShift / brightnessShift
• atmosphereHueShift / hueShift
• atmosphereLightIntensity
• atmosphereMieAnisotropy
• atmosphereMieCoefficient
• atmosphereMieScaleHeight
• atmosphereRayleighCoefficient
• atmosphereRayleighScaleHeight
• atmosphereSaturationShift / saturationShift

Ultimately these impact the shader uniforms in AtmosphereCommon.glsl:

uniform vec3 u_radiiAndDynamicAtmosphereColor;
uniform float u_atmosphereLightIntensity;
uniform float u_atmosphereRayleighScaleHeight;
uniform float u_atmosphereMieScaleHeight;
uniform float u_atmosphereMieAnisotropy;
uniform vec3 u_atmosphereRayleighCoefficient;
uniform vec3 u_atmosphereMieCoefficient;

Since the ground and sky atmosphere both represent the Earth's atmosphere, conceptually they should always use the same settings.

There's also two other benefits of combining them:

1. This streamlines the interface. Instead of changing settings in two places (skyAtmosphere and globe), you only need to change one (I'm thinking Globe, but open to suggestions).
2. It also would streamline things deeper in the implementation details. In #4196 I'm already considering changing the Globe's implementation to use AutomaticUniforms, this way it's easier to implement fog for 3D Tiles.

I'm curious if the community would find this to be a reasonable breaking change, or if there are use cases where configuring SkyAtmosphere and GroundAtmosphere differently is helpful. I'll ask about this on the forum as well.

[lilleyse]

I'm thinking Globe, but open to suggestions

I think the atmosphere options should be in its own object under Scene in case you don't have a globe

[ptrgags]

@lilleyse That's a good point, I like that for 2 more reasons:

1. It puts the parameters in their own dedicated struct to make
2. The implementation would have more symmetry with how scene.fog is implemented

[ptrgags]

I made a forum post to see if the community has any further thoughts on this.

[ptrgags]

A couple more thoughts:

1. For non-photorealistic rendering, it's kinda neat to be able to adjust the color of sky atmosphere and ground atmosphere/fog separately. So maybe the HSB shift parameters could be duplicated for each system, but keep the other atmosphere parameters in sync.
2. The flags that enable lighting for the sky/ground/fog are rather tangled. Here's a table to keep track of what affects what.

Setting	Purpose	(Globe) ground atmosphere	SkyAtmosphere	(Globe) Terrain fog	Fog culling
Viewer constructor: options.globe	If false, the globe is not created/rendered	If false, does not render.	If false, cannot use lighting from sun, but otherwise not affected	If false, not rendered	If false, no terrain so no fog culling.
globe.enableLighting	turns on lighting from the sun or other light source	Toggles lighting	toggles lighting (flag synced via Scene)	Toggles lighting regardless of globe.showGroundAtmosphere	No effect
globe.dynamicAtmosphereLighting	Use the sun or other light source. If false, use a light directly overhead of the vertex/fragment	Toggles dynamic lighting	Toggles dynamic lighting (flag synced via Scene)	Toggles dynamic lighting (regardless of globe.showGroundAtmosphere	No effect
globe.dynamicAtmosphereLightingFromSun	forces using the sun rather than the scene's current light source (sun or directional light)	Toggles forced sunlight	Toggles forced sunlight (flag synced via Scene)	Toggles forced sunlight regardless of globe.showGroundAtmosphere	No effect
globe.showGroundAtmosphere	Turns off rendering of the ground atmosphere	Not rendered	No effect	No effect	No effect
skyAtmosphere.show	Turns off rendering the sky atmosphere	No effect	Not rendered	No effect	No effect
fog.enabled	Turn off anything to do with fog.	No effect	no effect	Not rendered	No fog culling
fog.renderable	Toggle showing fog, but still allow fog culling	No effect	No effect	Not rendered	No effect

Some of these settings might be better off stored in the new scene.atmosphere so all the systems always are synced to it via FrameState and/or AutomaticUniforms

[ptrgags]

After thinking about the above parameters, here's a proposal for how this might be structured to make the UX for adjusting lighting better, and make it easier for atmosphere and fog settings to be applied to 3D Tiles (and any future system that needs them)

The tricky thing is this does involve quite a few breaking changes to the API, and deprecating things would be a bit tricky. Though at least for some of the settings, #11655 might be a good reference for determining how to deprecate settings.

scene.atmosphere: Atmosphere (new)

Purpose: Store common settings that affect all atmosphere rendering affects. This object does not do any rendering, but updates the FrameState so other systems can access the parameters.

Parameters:

• atmosphere.dynamicLighting: DynamicAtmosphereLightSource - New enum to control which light source is used:
  • OFF - No dynamic lighting, atmosphere will be lit from above for every vertex/fragment
  • SUNLIGHT - Dynamic lighting that always uses the sun direction
  • SCENE_LIGHT - Dynamic lighting that uses the scene's current light source
• atmosphere.LightIntensity - Light intensity for all atmosphere-related effects.
• atmosphere.Mie{Anisotropy, Coefficient, ScaleHeight} - Mie scattering settings
• atmosphere.Rayleigh{CoefficientScaleHeight} - Rayleigh scattering settings.
• atmosphere.perFragmentShading: bool - Force using the fragment shader. When false, the vertex shader will be used when possible for better performance.

scene.groundAtmosphere: GroundAtmosphere (new)

Purpose: Store common settings that affect ground atmosphere (impacts the globe and 3D Tiles) This will update the FrameState so other systems can access the parameters.

Parameters:

• groundAtmosphere.show: bool - Turn on ground atmosphere rendering for the globe and/or 3D Tiles. This does not affect fog.
• groundAtmosphere.hueShift/saturationShift/brightnessShift/: number - Adjust the HSB color of the ground atmosphere independent from other atmosphere rendering. This impacts both ground atmosphere and fog (since fog color is derived from ground atmosphere)
• groundAtmosphere.nightFadeInDistance/nightFadeOutDistance - Settings for when the darkness of night-time are applied
• groundAtmosphere.lightingFadeInDistance/lightingFadeOutDistance - Settings for when the ground atmosphere is lit by the sun/other light source.

scene.skyAtmosphere: SkyAtmosphere (modified)

Purpose: Renderable sky atmosphere. It manages any settings specific to the sky rendering

Parameters: (unchanged) skyAtmosphere.show: bool - Turn on sky atmosphere rendering (unchanged) skyAtmosphere.hueShift/saturationShift/brightnessShift/: number - Adjust the HSB color of the sky atmosphere independent from other atmosphere rendering. (remove) skyAtmosphere.atmosphere* -- move scattering settings to the common Atmosphere

Other details:

• Instead of having Scene sync the lighting settings from the globe, pull them from the FrameState

scene.globe: Globe (modified)

Purpose: Renderable globe that handles terrain, imagery and other rendering details. It also renders the ground atmosphere and fog for terrain. The main change is to unload some of the rendering settings to Atmosphere and GroundAtmosphere so other systems can access them even when the globe is turned off.

Parameters: (unchanged) globe.atmosphereHueShift/atmosphereSaturationShift/atmosphereBrightnessShift/: number -- Adjust the HSB color of the ground atmosphere and terrain fog only. (remove) globe.atmosphere* -- move scattering settings to the common Atmosphere (remove) globe.enableLighting, globe.dynamicAtmosphere* -- These flags were confusing and weirdly coupled to SkyAtmosphere and fog. Replace this with Atmosphere.dynamicLighting (now an enum) (remove) globe.showGroundAtmosphere - Move to groundAtmosphere.show so this setting can be used for 3D Tiles as well.

scene.fog: Fog (unchanged)

I think the settings for Fog are sufficient for now. The main change is that this will now impact 3D Tiles as well.

The fog color is still dependent on the ground atmosphere, but now the dedicated GroundAtmosphere will put the relevant settings in the FrameState so both terrain and 3D Tiles can access it.

[ptrgags]

After talking with @ggetz the other day, we think that the above is a bit of overkill. A couple changes to streamline the above:

1. a separate GroundAtmosphere class isn't really needed, just add the settings to scene.atmosphere (except for show which should be scoped to the primitive responsible for rendering, whether that's the globe or the tileset)
2. For consistency and ease of use, just have a single place for hue/saturation/brightness shift (also in scene.atmosphere). This means the colors for sky and ground atmosphere will always be in sync (before they were independent.

So to summarize the overall architecture

• scene.atmosphere will contain atmosphere settings for any of the systems that need it and update the FrameState
• scene.skyAtmosphere will still be there because it's needed for rendering the sky, but some of the parameters will move to scene.atmosphere
• scene.globe will have some of its parameters moved to scene.atmosphere

[ptrgags]

Some implementation details from #11744 that will need changes after we change the API:

(I'll update this as I find more)

• FogStage(FS|VS).glsl now use built-in functions for scattering such as czm_computeGroundAtmosphereScattering(), czm_getDynamicAtmosphereLightDirection() czm_computeAtmosphereColor(), etc. These ones use automatic uniforms, compared with the old globe shader that supplied the uniforms itself. Once the API changes to move parameters out of globe, switch to these new functions and remove the dead code that remains
• in Scene#updateEnvironment(), there's a section of code that calls skyAtmosphere.setDynamicLighting() from the globe flags. The if defined(globe) branch will no longer be needed once all atmosphere settings come from scene.atmosphere, the else clause will always run. Also DynamicAtmosphereLightingType.fromGlobeFlags() can be removed when this happens.
• For some reason the globe uses defines to select the light direction vector, but the sky atmosphere shader uses a uniform. for 3D Tiles I found the uniform version was easier to work with, so I made the built-in function czm_getDynamicAtmosphereLightDirection(). It might make sense for the globe and SkyAtmosphere to use this function too if possible

[ptrgags]

Some thoughts about how to make the Globe and SkyAtmosphere settings work during the deprecation period:

1. Whenever Scene.globe's setter is called, also set globe._atmosphere = this.atmosphere so the globe now has a reference to the atmosphere struct.
2. Change Scene.skyAtmosphere to a setter, and do a similar skyAtmosphere._atmosphere = this.atmosphere
3. Make a Scene.atmosphere setter that updates globe._atmosphere and skyAtmosphere._atmosphere to the new atmosphere object (if the globe/sky exist)
4. For Globe/SkyAtmosphere, turn all of the atmosphere-related members into properties, and the setters should: A. log a deprecation warning, and B. Don't update the globe/sky, update _atmosphere.<propertyNameHere> instead (checking first if _atmosphere is defined). If it's not defined... maybe another warning is needed (not the most elegant, but this is temporary for the deprecation period)
5. In the shaders, use the czm_atmosphere* builtins and functions
6. Also remove all old atmosphere uniforms manually set by the globe/sky atmosphere (u_atmosphere*) and the code used to configure them, as these will become dead code (note, make sure to check through GlobeSurfaceTileProvider.js and GlobeSurfaceShaderSet.js carefully.)