Mmmm... Planets.
by Mike Kuklinski · 04/20/2006 (3:02 am) · 20 comments
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.
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.
About the author
#2
04/20/2006 (4:44 am)
You and your silly image tags. 
#3
04/20/2006 (4:46 am)
Well it worked didn't it? :O)
#4
04/20/2006 (4:49 am)
Yeah, but it's still silly! 
#5
04/20/2006 (7:02 am)
Awesome... So what is the planet? A DTS? And is this done in TGE?
#6
04/20/2006 (7:04 am)
That's TSE. 
#7
04/20/2006 (7:35 am)
Looks cool! 
#8
04/20/2006 (12:44 pm)
It looks sort of static at the moment, can't you add some sort of glow to it, to act as the atmosphere? 
#9
04/20/2006 (12:45 pm)
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.
#11
04/20/2006 (1:07 pm)
Matt H -- my clouds and planet are already animated (rotating) differently. I dunno how to make atmospheric glow, though. 
#12
Looking good! Post some videos man, let's see those moving clouds!
04/20/2006 (1:41 pm)
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!
#13
04/20/2006 (1:47 pm)
One major problem is that the planet renders -slow-. In an optimized release build, I get around 12fps with it in the scene. 
#14
04/20/2006 (5:41 pm)
Hehe, man that would be cool if you could zoom out in Venture Africa to THAT distance.
#15
04/20/2006 (7:37 pm)
That just looks awesome.
#16
04/20/2006 (11:22 pm)
LOL Andy!!
#17
04/21/2006 (12:43 pm)
How many polys is that planet?
#18
04/21/2006 (1:06 pm)
Around ~500, the invisible side is never shown so I deleted the polys.
#19
04/21/2006 (6:22 pm)
You need a specular map.
#20
04/21/2006 (8:30 pm)
I had a specular map, I got rid of it since the planet looked odd being shiny... even when it was only the water...
Torque 3D Owner Todd Pickens
Very nice by the way.