Author Topic: Celestial Objects Thread  (Read 321847 times)

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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Let's necro this thread again... it seems to bring up more planets after every necro, so I don't see any reason to let it sink to oblivion... :p

Especially as I've been trying out some new things. Like mountain ranges that would look a bit more realistic than bumpmapped blobs of diffuse noise. Sooo... Came up with this. No rivers in it as of now, will likely be added at some point in the future, but for now I wanted to concentrate on the mountain ranges.



The scale of the mountains is somewhat off, though - but let's just say those are some bigass mountains on a moderately sized habitable moon and be done with it.  :p

Making the mountain ranges manually with 3x3 fuzzy brush and adding another level of fractality would likely end up in more realistic mountains, but would take inordinate amount of time. Does anyone know how to make kinda thunderbolt-style patterns procedurally with some filter/combination of filters? I obviously checked the GIMP's fractal stuff first, but the lighting fractal available in the list was kinda too simple for my purposes... :blah:
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Offline Ashrak

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
that lava one is sweet
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Offline Aardwolf

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
The mountains are a bit too regular and there's no terrain lighting/shadow; mountains should be darker on the side facing away from the sun, etc.

Nice spec-reflec on the water tho :D

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Actually, they do have lighting. That whole effect is the result of the terrain being bumpmapped. The resize to 1024x1024 just takes some of the effect away. Here's a bigger one...

However, the problem is more about program limitations than whether or not I want to apply bumpmapping to it. GIMP can sufficiently map a texture to a sphere, but bumping the sphere's surface is a bit too much for it. And, as the sun shines from different angles at different locations of the surface, I need to either manually bumpmap each visible region differently depending on how I guesstimate the sun light coming from; OR I can use an uniform moderate bump mapping applied to the whole texture. Which I did there.

For example, mountains near zenith are pretty much equally bright on both sides. Mountains near the terminator have much more difference on the lighting of the slopes - but that also depends on the angles of the slopes.


Perhaps I should just go and render it on some 3D program that can apply bumpmaps to objects, but there's something pretty cool about doing everything in GIMP from the beginning to end... :p
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Offline Aardwolf

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Ah, now I see it; still, the high parts seem too narrow.

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Ah, now I see it; still, the high parts seem too narrow.

That's because these mountain ranges are relatively simple, as well as the scale is way off like I said. The peak ridge itself actually is very narrow in most mountain ranges, but there are many many more of them than I have in this planet. If the scale were correct, these would need to be resized to about 1/10th of their size, and then copy-paste parts of them next to each other to cover the same area...

Compare:



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Offline Aardwolf

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Ah, ok...

Well, make it look better! Or make more of them! Or something!

 

Offline Excalibur

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Has someone considered making a sun? I suppose that lava planet looks a little like a sun, but would need way more light coming out of it...
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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Stellar Enhancements

Knock yourself out.
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Offline Excalibur

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
...Sir... :nervous:

"Whoa..." *sees stars...*

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Excalibur needs a note:

Do not use metaphors/anaolgies.
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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Trying to do something to increase the selection of not only planets, but also different phases of them.

planetg-<phase>.*




I'll try to find time to make similar high quality versions of planets/moons that would resemble the retail/current mediaVP planets (planetA-F)... to be honest, despite being a major improvement compared to the retail planets, the mediaVP ones aren't that good either (no offense to the makers). We'll see where this takes me... :shaking:
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Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
This is a very good idea.  The MediaVp planets are pretty obviously recolored solar system objects -- Mars even appears twice!
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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Cool, any ideas if my suggestion would yield pleasing results?
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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
I think Nelson would know better than me, so I'll quote you and myself for clarity...

Idea> instead of drawing up new phases for each planet, why not make a selection of masks to put over them in the background editor? :nervous: If it's feasible. Either the same colour as the default starfield.pof textured or some kind of freaky alpha map using SCPower to "erase/hide" a portion of the image file using layering maybe? :nervousagain: ;)

Assuming you can stack planet textures on top of each other and that it works well too. I don't know if that's even possible, but assuming it is...

I thought of that as well, but the problem is that in a full-lit version you would have the atmosphere surrounding the whole planet with a rather prominent glow. Now, if you would stack a shadow mask over it, you would need to stretch the shadow mask over the atmospheric glow of the underlying fully lit planet.

This would undoubtedly work pretty well, as long as the background doesn't have any nebulae on it. If it had any nebula behind the planet, the stretched shadow layer would visibly show up against the nebula, or at the very least it would be visibly larger than the lit side of the planet.

A possible solution would be to use a base texture of the planet without any atmospheric glow whatsoever, and overlay that with appropriate shadow/atmo-glow hybrid layer. But that would require the mission designer to stack the two planets on the correct positions, then rotate the shadow/glow layer to correct position, and on the user end it would end up using twice as much VRAM as simple baked-in shadow/glow planet image would. I have no idea how much of the actual rendering performance goes to the background and how much the performance would be hit, but every unnecessary bit is too much in my opinion...

Another thing is that with some planets (especially those that are on skybox use and thus are very high resolution) the direction from which the light supposedly comes from can pronounce terrain elevation (mountains) and it could look fairly stupid to have mountains on the surface of a planet and notice that they look more like canyons judging by the supposed lighting. :p


That said, I need some opinions.

This is the retail planeta1.pcx:




What I need is opinion on whether this is supposed to be a water-covered planet with clouds on the atmosphere, OR an Uranus/Neptune-like mostly featureless gas giant?

I think it's supposed to be an oceanic planet/moon, for three reasons. One, it has a reflection, which points to clearly defined interface between shiny (liquid) surface and atmosphere. Gas giants just have clouds all over with respectable amount of albedo, but they don't produce glints or reflections like the surface of liquid or ice. Two, it has a very thick atmosphere in relation to the planet's diameter; gas giants don't really have visible atmo glows from the distance it takes to fit it onto the field of view entirely. Or, well, they do, but it's thickness is lost in the relative diameter of the planet, and doesn't even reach one pixel on these shots so it's not worth the trouble to get into them.

Three, the clouds seem much more like the ones on Earth than the ones seen on gas giants (though that's mostly just my edumacated opinion, but still).

Fourth point wold be the combination of reflection and the fact that the reflection is blue, which means that the atmosphere scatters blue light in very similar way as Earth's atmosphere does (since water itself is almost colourless, it's blue on Earth only because the atmosphere happens to scatter blue light the most and absorb other wavelengths more). On a cloudy day, water is grey...


I know that in current MediaVP's it's more like a gas giant, but I think that's a bit of a mistake... I personally am an advocate of a water planet (since the retail seems to point to that direction in my opinion), but I understand if people used to MediaVP interpretation would want to keep it more like gas giant.

So, I'm open to opinions. :)


EDIT: Here's a water planet as a possible replacement for planeta1, complete with five phases.



 ;)
« Last Edit: February 26, 2008, 03:24:44 pm by Herra Tohtori »
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Offline Retsof

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
This is a good idea, do you know how hard it is to get phases to line up with the sun position in FRED.  It really limits where you can place your planets.
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Offline blowfish

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
Are planets usually that shiny?

 
Re: Celestial Objects Thread
well that one is a water planet, making it completely reflective.
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Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread

I always interpreted a1 to be a gas giant; but that is only because Lightspeed seems to have used an image of Neptune as his replacement for it.  All the standard planets are pretty boring by now.
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Offline Flaser

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Re: Celestial Objects Thread
What happened last time when somebody tried to use actual modeled planets?
That would take care of the lighting and shadow - the only problematic area I see is the air coronas. Putting them into the skybox would also solve the scaling issues and make them render after everything else.
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