Ogre Tech Demo

[loonycyborg]

I wasn't planning on giving gas giants separate atmospheres, because the whole planet is essentially an atmosphere.

Nope. Under such pressure even hydrogen is solid.

[M4lV]

not really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_giant

Those screenies look damn cool!

[pd]

Well, whatever they are, Tzlaine was just talking about how they are rendered.
Besides this, who cares about realism here?

[M4lV]

right! we have our own little 3D combat project going on at botf2 (for half a year now), but it's using Irrlicht and art-wise not as crispy as this one when it comes to planets and galaxy background :



who knows, one might be able to cooperate there provided ogre and irrlicht don't bite each other too much..

[loonycyborg]

Well, whatever they are, Tzlaine was just talking about how they are rendered.

Then their phase is irrelevant, and Tzlaine should draw inspiration from photos of jovian planets, not from physical considerations.

[Tortanick]

I wasn't planning on giving gas giants separate atmospheres, because the whole planet is essentially an atmosphere.

Nope. Under such pressure even hydrogen is solid.

Mere technicalities With planets that size the solid core is so far deep down that you can't see it though the atmosphere, since this is a graphics thing that means you can ignore it.

[loonycyborg]

But the 'atmosphere' is so dense that it looks solid. The fact that it's in gas phase doesn't tell anything about how it looks. Also, the fact that it's in gas phase doesn't make it automatically atmosphere..

[shrinkshooter]

Also, the fact that it's in gas phase doesn't make it automatically atmosphere..

If it's in gas phase, and it's part of a planet, it's the atmosphere. I could spout of a bunch of science to back this up but I won't. If it's not part of a planet it's either a small, random cloud of gas floating about in space (which will probably dissipate) or a nebula.

[pd]

It's an artistic choice. Please get back on topic guys.

[eleazar]

I've set up all basic atmosphere shaders and am now using tweaked sidepanel textures. Those are going to be scaled up and repainted at a higher resolution soon.

The atmospheres and dark-side effects look really nice.

However before a lot of work is put into scaling up the planet textures, at the very least the depiction of "swamp" and "toxic" should be rethought. It's extremely easy to confuse the two especially under colored lighting conditions

[pd]

I agree that those could be more distinct. I tried to make swamp look more like a jungle and I've thought about using a blueish atmosphere, to suggest it's a less toxic world. For the toxic planet a yellow atmsophere and more yellowish/, "poisonous" colors have been used, together with glowing spots on the dark side. Any suggestions to improve the distinction(or anything else, for that matter) are welcome of course.

[eleazar]

I agree that those could be more distinct. I tried to make swamp look more like a jungle and I've thought about using a blueish atmosphere, to suggest it's a less toxic world. For the toxic planet a yellow atmsophere and more yellowish/, "poisonous" colors have been used, together with glowing spots on the dark side. Any suggestions to improve the distinction(or anything else, for that matter) are welcome of course.

Pushing the swamp toward the blues and toxic toward yellow is a good start. To really make them distinct i think we need to work with texture as well as color. The Barren, Terran, Gas Giant and Inferno planets are easy to distinguish (even at small sizes, and/or under the light of different colored suns) because they have a individual pattern/texture that's usually bold enough to identify the planet
I've been doing some scribbling to try to come up with distinct appearances for planet types. I'm not yet happy with the results (and my FTP client isn't working at the moment), but it seems reasonable to make the "swamp" look a little more earthlike, perhaps with scattered islands and/or mountains/uplands poking through, while the "toxic" could be more swirling gasses and such muck.


P.S. Are we also ready to do a separate layer for the clouds? I removed the clouds from some of the textures as a test long ago, and just posted, but didn't commit yet.

[pd]

Yes clouds are sepperate, although always white at the moment.

[shrinkshooter]

I assume we use static textures for the planets. I was going to suggest perhaps putting in flashes from global storms on toxic planets, but that would require animation. Maybe not much, perhaps 20 frames or so with a pause on the texture with no flash (or lead up/fade out thereof). I don't know that this would even work, but nothing to lose by suggesting it.

[pd]

Such pulsing or flashing effects would surely look nice. I think it's quite inefficient though to do this with traditional frame based animation, considering those planet textures are quite large (1024x512 or more). I figure it would be better to come of with a shader solution, maybe using some of the glow effects, that Zach has added lately.