Celestia Forums

Please try to add nebulae to celestia. My Science teacher would really like that.

Hi! These new forums are wonderful...

With respect to the nebulae problem: Celestia is a 3D simulation. That means every object can be viewed from any angle. That's no problem for planets and moons, since we generally have photographed them from every viewpoint (or the surface appearance can be roughly inferred for unphotographed regions, as is the case of Mercury, the moons of Uranus and Neptune...)

Nebulae are a problem, because we know them from just one angle: that of Earth's position. They are light-years away, and so we are in no situation to infer how does Horsehead Nebula, Triffid Nebula or any other one look from other vantage points in the galaxy.

The only solution would be to paste photos for nebulas in their correct position and angular diameter in the sky, but those photos would look flat and unrealistic when viewed from a star far away from the Earth.

Anyway, I think there is a not so difficult way to add nebulae to Celestia. I'll expose it in the Developer's forum, if you want to read it.

Best regards!

Bruckner

I think it would be a geat idea to add nebula! a must have for Celetia! even if it is just 256x256 or 512x512 2D images, perhaps with a fictional bump mapping to give it a 3D look. for example take a 512x512 M42.png or jpg image file and mesh it with a 512x512 fictional greyscale M42Bump.jpg bumpmap. What do you think?? I have some good nebula images and it would be easy to creat a matching bumpMap to go with it.
then make a Nebula.ssc file to go in the Data dir. it would be really great to have nebula in the program, please consider this idea and let me know what you think. Mark

The only problem is figuring out the correct material application in MAX to use to render transparency...been working on this...as soon as I find out I'll let all of you know...

Don't expect much without altering the code though...I think that the software doesn't allow MAX materials.

But he's right on the fact that Nebs will appear different in different points in space...Also I have found that the only way to add an object into the sim is making it a sattlite of a star. I'm gonna have a look at the coding this weekend...