Infinite Plane zone shape for Trigger Zone and Wireless Receiver

TheBeardyMan 14 February 2022 09:58

Suppose that you have a custom camera that needs to see the interior of a walled room from a viewpoint outside of the room. Not an unusual thing in video games in general - there are several games that do this.

But not so easy to create in Dreams. You need to turn off the visibility of any walls that occlude the interior of the room, which requires you to determine on which side of the plane of the wall the camera lies. You might think that a Trigger Zone tweaked to detect cameras could do this, but the Trigger Zone doesn't have a zone shape that will detect on which side of a plane something lies and do nothing else. The cube, cylinder, and cone zone shapes have flat surfaces that can serve as planes, but even at their largest sizes, their other surfaces can cause false results if you try to use them to solve the problem of whether a wall occludes the interior of a room.

An infinite plane zone shape would make the Trigger Zone an ideal gadget for solving this problem. And the math for an infinite plane is simpler than the other shapes - one scalar product and one compare. Compare that with the cube zone shape, whose simplest possible math is three scalar products and six compares.

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  TAPgiles

  • 14 February 2022 17:19

  

  Interesting. I'm all for the new shape idea.

  It's fairly easy to do occlusion detection though. If the camera is inside (from a single trigger zone), don't hide walls. Otherwise it's outside, so turn on a trigger zone in the head tracker looking for the walls. When the wall is detected, it makes itself invisible--that sort of thing.

  I have a tutorial showing how to do that kind of set up (pre-head-tracker): https://youtu.be/RHASqETmj3o

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