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Mmmm... Planets.

Name:	Mike Kuklinski
Date Posted:	Apr 20, 2006
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Blog post

Well, with a slightly increased vigor for coding after I played a few hours of EVE Online (makes me think about my space sim, and how to beat them graphically), I decided to look at my planet renderer again, something that was a constant thorn in my side.

I made a few test runs:

Too shiny.

Way too shiny.

Too shiny and somehow too dull!

So then I edited the material to drastically cut down the effect of specular, then I moved the planet around for better shots:

Ooh.

Pretty.

Interesting.

Out of all of them, the last was my favorite, so I toned up the image a bit:

Did I get any 'real' work done? No. But I made a planet look cool.

Edit:

Hey look, I think I see Venture Africa!

Edit 2:

By playing around with the cloud layer resolution, I was able to bring the FPS up from 14 to 110. Yay.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	02/10/08 - irc.maxgaming.net #garagegames 02/04/08 - StackHeap Master Server Beta Release 02/03/08 - StackHeap Master Server 12/21/07 - Engine Writing 01/17/07 - Kuiper Work .. lots of pictures. 09/13/06 - MS4? No one told me! 06/10/06 - Kuiper Optimizations, and other stuff 06/02/06 - Orbit - Newtonian Physics

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Todd Pickens (Apr 20, 2006 at 03:11 GMT)

Mike the tag to get the images to show in the post is "image" not "img"

Very nice by the way.

Mike Kuklinski (Apr 20, 2006 at 04:44 GMT)

You and your silly image tags.

Todd Pickens (Apr 20, 2006 at 04:46 GMT)

Well it worked didn't it? :O)

Mike Kuklinski (Apr 20, 2006 at 04:49 GMT)

Yeah, but it's still silly!

James Laker (BurNinG) (Apr 20, 2006 at 07:02 GMT)

Awesome... So what is the planet? A DTS? And is this done in TGE?

Josh Moore (Apr 20, 2006 at 07:04 GMT)

That's TSE.

Timothy Aste (Apr 20, 2006 at 07:35 GMT)

Looks cool!

Joseph Helm (Apr 20, 2006 at 12:44 GMT)

It looks sort of static at the moment, can't you add some sort of glow to it, to act as the atmosphere?

Edited on Apr 20, 2006 12:45 GMT

Matt Huston (Apr 20, 2006 at 12:45 GMT)

Not sure how you've done it but I would create 2 spheres, one with the diffuse and bump/normal map applied (I'm assume thats what this is already), the other a bit larger with an alpha-channeled diffuse map for clouds. You could also create another for the planetary glow bit. And you can animate the cloud sphere to rotate against the planet to give the illusion of clouds slowly moving.
Edited on Apr 20, 2006 12:46 GMT

Alan Hembra (Apr 20, 2006 at 12:56 GMT)

I like this. Makes me wish you were doing the new "Elite" game.

Mike Kuklinski (Apr 20, 2006 at 13:07 GMT)

Matt H -- my clouds and planet are already animated (rotating) differently. I dunno how to make atmospheric glow, though.

Dave Calabrese (Apr 20, 2006 at 13:41 GMT)

For atmospheric glow, you could try a transparent sphere which had a material applied, of which contained no textures however only a luminosity falloff. The resulting effect (or so I think it might be...) is a glow that you don't see in front of you, but softly fades in and sharply cuts off at the edges of the sphere, and does this no matter what direction you are facing. Then, (probably need a custom material for all of this, since I don't think TSE has built in luminosity falloff), apply a modified glow that is much smaller than the default TSE glow, and give it the same color as the 'sharp edge' of the luminosity falloff has. Then you MIGHT, theoretically, have an atmosphere that slowly fades in over the actual planet - and always at the edges of the planet no matter where you look at it from - and then gently fades out in space away from the planet. Again, I'm almost positive you would need some custom shaders to do that, but... that's all I've got. =)

Looking good! Post some videos man, let's see those moving clouds!

Mike Kuklinski (Apr 20, 2006 at 13:47 GMT)

One major problem is that the planet renders -slow-. In an optimized release build, I get around 12fps with it in the scene.

Andy Schatz (Apr 20, 2006 at 17:41 GMT)

Hehe, man that would be cool if you could zoom out in Venture Africa to THAT distance.

Jon Jorajuria (Apr 20, 2006 at 19:37 GMT)

That just looks awesome.

Tim Muenstermann (Apr 20, 2006 at 23:22 GMT)

LOL Andy!!

James Laker (BurNinG) (Apr 21, 2006 at 12:43 GMT)

How many polys is that planet?

Mike Kuklinski (Apr 21, 2006 at 13:06 GMT)

Around ~500, the invisible side is never shown so I deleted the polys.

Ben Garney (Apr 21, 2006 at 18:22 GMT)

You need a specular map.

Mike Kuklinski (Apr 21, 2006 at 20:30 GMT)

I had a specular map, I got rid of it since the planet looked odd being shiny... even when it was only the water...

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