Specify Rendering Techniques

You can change the rendering of the scene through the controls on the navigation panel or options on the rendering menu. The vrpend and vrplanets examples are used to show the viewer functionality.

You can turn the antialiasing of the scene on or off. Antialiasing applies to the textures of a world. Antialiasing is a technique that attempts to smooth the appearance of jagged lines. These jagged lines are the result of a printer or monitor not having enough resolution to represent a line smoothly. When Antialiasing is on, the jagged lines are surrounded by shades of gray or color. Therefore, the lines appear smoother rather than jagged.

The following figure depicts the vrplanets example View on Earth viewpoint with Antialiasing on. To display the effects of antialiasing better, turn Headlight on. You can turn antialiasing on or off to observe the differences.

You can turn the camera headlight and the lighting of the scene on or off. When Headlight is off, the camera does not emit light. Therefore, the scene can appear dark. For example, the following figure depicts the vrpend example with Headlight on.

The scene looks darker when Headlight is set to off.

Note

It is helpful to define enough lighting within the virtual scene so that it is lit regardless of the Headlight setting.

When Lighting is off, the virtual world appears as if lit in all directions. The Simulink^® 3D Animation™ viewer does not compute and render all the lighting effects at the surfaces of the objects. Shadows disappear and the scene loses some of its 3-D quality. The following is the vrpend example with Lighting off.

If Transparency is off, transparent objects are rendered as solid objects.

Turning Wireframe on changes the scene objects from solid to wireframe rendering. The following is the vrpend example with Wireframe on.

If the Textures option is on, objects have texture in the virtual scene. Here is the vrplanets example with Textures on:

If Textures is off, objects do not have texture in the virtual scene. The following is the vrplanets example with Textures off.

You can specify the maximum size of a texture used in rendering the vrfigure object. This option gives you a list of texture sizes to choose from. See the vrfigure MaxTextureSize property for further details.

Turn Off Rendering for Performance

You can use the Rendering property for either a vrfigure or vr.canvas object to turn off rendering for the object in the Simulink 3D Animation Viewer. For example, if your code does batch operations on a virtual figure, you can turn off rendering during that processing and then turn it back on after the processing.

You can also use the new Simulink 3D Animation > World > Default Figure Rendering preference (DefaultFigureRendering) to specify whether to render a newly created virtual figure or canvas object.