Poll Part1: Voting gas giant surface textures

[pyramid]

Several (9) gas giant planet surfaces are due for replacement:
*gas_dwarf.png
*gas_giant.png
*gas_giant2.png
*gas_giant3.png
*gas_giant4.png
*gas_giant5.png
*gas_medium.png
*gas_midget.png
*gas_midget1.png

I am posting here a poll to select new replacement surfaces for gas giants. The winners of the poll will be committed to svn as soon as there can be seen enough favorites.

Please open the textures preview link in a new window or tab for easier reference when voting:
http://space3d.no.sapo.pt/gallery_gasgi ... part1.html

Those textures were created with POV-Ray using my own procedural routines. Out of the many samples I have selected those with personality and character. I hope you like them.

Please vote for your favorite.

[loki1950]

pyramid textures they remind me of some great marbles i had when i was a kiddie the keepsees.

Enjoy the Choice

[charlieg]

Argh, too many to choose from. Generally I prefer the more detailed ones, they look stormy.

[charlieg]

It doesn't help that the link you gave doesn't match the poll - planet numbers are different. I'm not going to cross check all the numbers, but for instance 017 is only on the gallery and 018 is only on the poll.

[pyramid]

Ok, ok, now the web pages for part1 and part2 are separated and the numbers on the page match the numbers in the poll. In addition, two columns can be now seen also in IE.

The reason is that I had planned to join all 20 surfaces in one poll, but this was over the limit, so I had to separate them, and could only this morning try it out on IE.

Hope this is more frienly now.

[klauss]

164, 149 & 061 are quite decent.
In fact, they can complement the stormy ones.
But the rest... I just prefer the stormy ones.

For instance, 152, though definitely decent in terms of subtlety (it doesn't show any obvious defect), it's too subtle to be interesting. Sad, because the "spot pattern" seems about right. Hm... don't throw it away, adding cloud layer shadows to it might improve it beyond expectations: I've noticed that my volumetric cloud algorithms tend to work much better with seemingly uniform color maps. But that's for earth, I don't think gas giants would appreciate uniformity - I dunno.

[pyramid]

Actually, I love the 152 exactly because of it's subtlety. This pics in the link are small and unable to show all the detail. It should look great in close orbit with a hires map. Of course, finally the community choice will end up ingame. Hmm...definitely will not throw away this one.

Are your volumetric cloud algorithms already committed to svn? On which planets can I see them?

[klauss]

No, I have the shaders and mostly everything set up in my local copy of the Ogre port. Didn't commit yet as it's a bit sloppy, and recent developments (like a cooler getting busted) stopped me cold on that front (can't de-sloppify until I fix it).
But I can rather easily (though not entirely automatically) do bakings to texture, so the results can be somewhat used ingame (the bakings would add some ambiguous shadow patterns to add detail).

[pyramid]

I think the previews are already excellent. Good work. Eagerly waiting to see this effort released.

[Shark]

I tried creating a random solar system generator in POV-Ray (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Quadran ... larsys.htm). I doubt you could use it for the generation of your textures, though.

[pyramid]

Nice work, shark.
You're right though, I can't use your textures for vs. However I might want to copy some of your ideas. E.g. planet 2 from scene 1 has nice surface features.