Sundog--SilverLining brings 3D clouds and skies to VulkanSceneGraph

Version 6.38 of the SilverLining Sky, 3D Clouds, and Weather SDK now includes a public Beta of Vulkan support, and an integration example with VulkanSceneGraph (VSG!) The screenshot above shows the canonical teapot object rendered by VSG, with SilverLining’s physically realistic skies and clouds behind it.

Many of our existing customers are using SilverLining with the OpenGL-based OpenSceneGraph for simulation and training applications, and we’re excited to help pave the path toward the more modern Vulkan API for these customers.

VulkanSceneGraph makes writing Vulkan-based applications surprisingly easy, and integration of SilverLining is also surprisingly simple. Inside the sample apps folder of the SilverLining SDK, you’ll find a VulkanSceneGraph example that can be built using CMake (refer to the readme file with the sample for information on the necessary prerequisites and environment variables to build it successfully.)

There really isn’t much to it; the derived SilverLiningGroup class illustrates how to initialize and instantiate SilverLining with the various underlying Vulkan objects it needs to integrate with your VSG application, and how to synchronize your view and projection matrices with SilverLining. The derived SilverLiningCommand class shows how to draw the sky and clouds each frame, and set the desired weather. The only quirk worth mentioning is that SilverLining requires dynamic scissoring to be enabled, and so you must explicitly set a viewport and scissoring rectangle each frame within SilverLiningCommand::record().

This sample only scratches the surface of what SilverLining is capable of; a wide variety of cloud types and precipitation effects are at your disposal, as well as advanced features such as the creation of environment maps based on the currently simulated sky, and shadow maps based on the currently simulated clouds.