Got Planets?

spaceranger · Post by **spaceranger** » Sat May 19, 2007 4:19 am

Hi folks, just stumbled onto Vega Strike from a link on the Orbiter (free space sim, I'd imagine Orbiter is probably not unknown amongst some here) and it looks like great fun!

I've been developing a solar system addon for Orbiter (the FireFly 'Verse) and I'm at the point of generating some textures for it. They all happen to be 8K x 4X spherical maps generated in Lunarcell/PS (I may use other programs, for gas giants and moons, been toying with Terragen also).

Do you folks need more planet textures??? My first priority would be to my Orbiter mod, but hey, I'll have the textures all done for that at some point, and not everything I generate will be used in it, so I'm willing to share some textures for this mod.

Here's my current favorite:

And another somewhat oddball image that caught me by surprise, I think it's got character:

Cheers! And keep flyin'!

EDIT: BTW, these snapshots were taken from within the Orbiter program. What you're seeing is a .tex (I believe Orbiter's .tex are actually .dds files) version of the original .bmps.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Wed May 23, 2007 1:23 am

They look nice but a bit too fractal-ish. I suppose the atmo is generated by Orbiter, as opposed to part of the texture?

spaceranger · Post by **spaceranger** » Wed May 23, 2007 2:26 am

Yep, the atmo is rendered by Orbiter in these pics. There's definitely some fractal-ness to these, but I haven't found many examples of planets which look more realistic than this.

If you can show me any, I'd be glad to see them!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Wed May 23, 2007 4:57 am

Oh, there certainly are. Have you looked at the libnoise page? They have a planet so realistic there you might think it's real. Let me see if I can find a link...

Here:
http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/example ... index.html
Notice that the pics are thumbs you can click on for higher rez.

Of course, that's done off-line, taking many hours; but there's also this coming game... what was the name of it now? That the planets are procedurally generated on the fly and look pretty damned good.

spaceranger · Post by **spaceranger** » Wed May 23, 2007 5:41 am

Those Terragen shots are great! There's still 'fractalness' in the 2D shots and the noise maps, can't really get away from Perlin with this stuff.

I'm looking forward to engines coming out that can use procedural techniques, and can load endless maps as tiles while roaming.

But, ok, if there's no use for these planet textures, I'll just keep plugging away on my Orbiter systems.

Cheers!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Wed May 23, 2007 5:50 am

I was just giving you an opinion; I'm not the one to accept or reject material here; and those shots are better than much of what's in-game in most mods right now, so don't give up yet

. Yeah, the problem with libnoise is that you really have to know what you're doing. It's not a shrinkwrapped planet generator; but rather a generic noise library. I played with it a bit, but didn't get anything near the quality of that example planet; and what I wanted to do was real-time procedural terrains that LOD seamlessly as you aproach tha planet surface, and move most of the code to the gpu; but understanding the code in libnoise is another hurdle...

spaceranger · Post by **spaceranger** » Wed May 23, 2007 6:44 am

Right on. I've tooled a bit with C++ for Orbiter vessel modules and the thought of using libnoise for something has crossed my mind before, but yeah, a lot of time and effort for me right now.

I was actually going to see if I could tweak the bump mapping in PS a bit by generating noise along contraints (to make ridges) and then overlaying/blending the results with the bump map from Lunarcell.

We'll see how it goes ...

Cheers