Celestia Forums

That's a good looking ship. I like the detail, especially in the frame and the engine reactor thing. I have some engineering suggestions. These should be taken with a grain of salt since I'm not a rocket engineer. I think it's unnecessarily long. The external frame only really connects the engines t...

Many thanks to ElChristou for his feedback on my asteroid expansion pack. I have updated the add-on with fixes for the model files and some documentation improvements. Get it here:
http://www.wronkiewicz.net/moreasteroids.zip

Matt

On those papers, they talk about almost 100 bodies; do you plan to add more to your catalogue? They only posted model files for 20 or so of them, so I could add more if I can get them to give me more files, or if I can figure out their shape generating algorithms and create model files on my own. I...

wronkiew wrote:The polygon count of the models is reduced to 800 from the original 1600 to improve rendering performance.

Oops. That should be vertex count, not polygon count.

Matt

Thank you very much for the feedback. in your pack there is a asteroidcolors.ssc; aren't they the old values? I am certain that they are the most recent colors. In the old compilation, some asteroids had blue levels higher than the red values. In the new compilation, all the asteroids are redder tha...

I have put together an asteroid add-on pack containing simulation data for 40 (real) asteroids. About half of them are displayed using the models the University of Helsinki generated from lightcurve data. The rest are just ellipsoids. Some of them have satellites too. Of course, all the asteroids ar...

I found a bug in my color generator program which was making all the asteroid colors extra blue. Also there are some additional problems with the asteroid Eros in particular. Here's how it looked before I started messing with it, compared to a colorized NEAR image on the right. http://www.wronkiewic...

You're very welcome. Fridger, something I don't understand about adding a hundred thousand asteroids to Celestia is, how will you see the new asteroids? Will you be able to see them as points of light when you move into the main belt? If they're only visible when entered by name, there are only a co...

Here's the source code for the asteroid color generator:
http://www.wronkiewicz.net/spectrum2rgb.c
and the data file, which contains the solar emissive spectra:
http://www.wronkiewicz.net/solar_spectrum.txt

Matt

I can do that. The program is just a C file, and it needs one extra data file. Are you using a particular version of the GPL? How do I check it in?

Thanks. That's exactly what I was looking for. I added in the effect of sunlight and created an addon file for the default asteroids. Here's the URL of the SSC file:
http://www.wronkiewicz.net/asteroidcolors.ssc
I think this would have to go in the extras directory.

Matt

Thanks for the suggestion, Chris.

The datasets for SMASS can be found here:
http://smass.mit.edu/
I'm probably going to just use set 2.

I do understand how to merge SSC files. I am a little confused about how to distribute my changes. Should I create a script that merges the changes in to the asteroids.ssc file, and post that on the Motherlode? Or should I merge the changes myself and post the new asteroids.ssc? My coloration code g...

I have written a little program to convert asteroid reflectance data from the SMASS survey into RGB values for Celestia. To test the output I compared the generated color of Eros with the value already in the asteroids.ssc file. The hue and saturation were very close. The default color values for th...