Screenshots
First of all, I would like to make a formal request for planet shots (earth or otherwise)... the ones I could find are rubbish.
Second, I would also like comments on whatever seems wrong. The objective is utter graphic realism, without sacrificing too much simplicity (that is, atmosphere self-shadowing is greatly simplified, and atmosphere shadows are nonexistent - an acceptable simplification given the extreme thinness of the atmosphere relative to planetary radius). The screenshots show a single-pass version, with some artifacts on the horizon, but a multipass version can be constructed (and will, I'd say) that would eliminate those artifacts. Furthermore, the singlepass version would show less prominent artifacts with a more precise mesh, so I wouldn't worry about that.
The shots were taken off RenderMonkey... so if you'd like to test it yourself, I can post the RM project itself in a day or two.
@Chuck: I would really appreciate your comments on this, since you've already worked with shady planets. I didn't use your shader as a base start, mainly because it was largely unfit for integration with the existing Ogre framework (rather, I used one of the shaders I'm using with units).
What has been implemented:
- Textures
- Diffuse
- Specular
- City lights
- Coming soon: clouds/lightmap
- Fresnel-ish modulated specular highlights.
- Quasi-realistic atmosphere scattering and absorption.
- Configurable items:
- Diffuse contrast.
- Atmospheric lighting contrast (atmospheric self-shadowing)
- Atmospheric light scattering color.
- Atmospheric light absorption color.
- Atmospheric absorption rate (for tweaking)