I have encountered an issue where I am seeing a seam across the objects(normals to be exact) when the object goes behind the camera (z > 0).
So even before for lighting, I use the normals directly as final pixel color for debugging. In this mode, I see a seam across objects when they pass behind the camera. Attaching a screenshot
Since the normals do not undergo any kind of transformation(atleast in my code apart from MV matrix), I would expect that for every vertex and adjacent vertices, the normals would be continuous considering they are in the same space(modelview). I could imagine negative numbers could cause this, so I remapped the normalized normals to (0-1) for debugging and I still see the seams.
I think I found what was causing it. I was setting the z component to v.z/r. Taking the absolute value alleviates it. But I still see “holes” across the poles and meridian.
Setting z to a constant, like 1.0 or other, just causes the geometry to disappear or gives mangled vertices for a complex scene.
Any recommendations as to how to handle z effectively?
I would just set it to distance, transformed to the range (-1,+1), i.e. zero maps to -1, the maximum distance to +1. The maximum distance will determine the precision of the depth buffer. W should be set to 1.
If you have issues with surfaces being obscured by surfaces which should be behind them, that can’t entirely be prevented; it’s an inevitable consequence of trying to apply a non-linear transformation to the vertices. Tessellation should reduce it.
