Visual Effects
Various 3D object visual effects can be specified in this panel, such as applying color mapping to elevation or attribute data, selecting data to be mapped, and surface characteristics.
Color Mapping
Texturing - Colormap File
- The Texturing tick box determines whether to create the texture from a passed vertex color or to pass colors as vertex colors. In general, Texturing enabled is recommended for most uses. If disabled, vertex colors will be at the subsampled grid resolution, and lighting and shading will be disabled in the 3D PDF view.
- The Legend Label sets text to be shown above the legend bar on the right side of the exported PDF page.
- A colormap to be applied can be chosen with Use Colormap File as Texture. The texture file format may be Surfer (.clr) or ParaView XML type. A texture image is generated internally based on Elevation/Depth values of grid. See How-To section for description of colormap formats.
- Alternatively an image file can be selecting using Use Image File as Texture on the Geospatial tab.
Set Colormap Range
- Colormap Min and Max values set a user-specified elevation to be mapped onto the colormap range, shown in the legend. If not specified, colormap is applied to the full extent of the input data range.
- The Map Colormap is helpful when some additional attribute or color source is available in the input file.The representation "Along Z Values" is to apply a colormap file, with color legendbar annotation, showing elevation of the grid or point input data. If the input data has some attribute, such as LiDAR "intensity", then "With Attributes" applies the colormap file and legendbar to these attributes, rather than Z. Note that "With Attributes" is the default, and not attributes are available, this mode should be set to "Along Z Values". Further, if the input file contains RGB colour values, then "Show RGB Colors" can be specified to ignore Z, intensity and directly use the input model colour, such as in xyzrgb input files.
- Set Intensity Range may be selected to subset the range of interest from all the available input data, where input data has secondary attribute information, such as in LiDAR xyz + intensity. If enabled, then only data falling within specified Min-Max range will be loaded from file and shown, all other input data elements will be ignored.
- Intensity Min specifies minimum attribute to consider if Set Intensity Range is enabled.
- Intensity Max specifies maximum attribute to consider if Set Intensity Range is enabled.
Binding to Attributes or Elevation
Channel Selection for Color, Attributes and Elevation Data
Raster image formats such as GeoTIFF and IMG may contain RGB color images, or some multi-channel attribute data, or even elevation terrain data. This tab enables selection to pick out the most appropriate channels for conversion.
Binding Mode
To use an elevation colormap file on typical elevation data, change Binding Mode to "Along Z" If displaying RGB color directly from the file, normally the correct colormap channels will be selected. However, if needed these can be specified manually as zero-based channel number in a multi-channel file (such as .IMG).
Elevation Mode
Normally images are used as 2D quads or as textures. In the case the image such as GeoTIFF or IMG contain elevation data, this Elevation mode parameter should be set to enable Elevation mode. In this way the raster data will be interpreted as a 3D elevation terrain grid. Where there is misssing data, the missing data flag value can be specified.
Material Surface Shading Effects
This section lets you to select a color for diffuse, specular, ambient and emission. As well as shininess and crease angle. Note that enabling this options will override the original parameter (ambient color, shininess, etc.) on the scene.
Note the Shininess parameter controls the shape (width-area) of the specular highlight. If there is no Specular or very dark Specular term, this will have no visible effect. The Shininess parameter range is from 0.0 to 1.0, with the higher value creating a tight small spot for the highlight. Any values above 1.0 will be treated as if they are 1.0. In the following example, Diffuse and Ambient are set very dark, Specular color set to bright yellow. Three different settings of Shininess are shown. This term is sometimes implemented as an exponential power in the Phong shading model.