Celestia Forums

hey guys i just recently got celestia and i love it! i was first turned to this type of program by universe sandbox, but i was frustrated that such a great type of learning tool was being sold. so, naturally, i looked for freeware lol. and i found my new love: celestia. this program is great. just had it for a few days now and i'm already realizing the limitless possibilities. right now i'm just messing with re-texturing and such, but i am going to try my hand at creating add-ons and stand-alone systems orbiting existing stars or even create my own star system. thats gonna take some work though.

anyway i thought i'd share with the community my customized version of the solar system!
i was searching the celestia motherlode and found some great terraformed maps of the moon and mars, so i implemented them.

but then i got to thinking: what is the point of terraforming a world if no one is living there??

so i got to work on making night lights for the moon and mars (terraformed). i used GIMP2. i used the "sparks" brush, then "colorified"(gimp lingo, apparently) the layer so it wasn't banana yellow anymore. so now my moon and mars look like they're colonized and fully populated! plus they have clouds. i reworked the earth cloudmap for mars, just tinted it slightly yellowish, and blurred the clouds a tad bit. (who know what they'd really look like anyway) but they don't look TOO cartoony.

i got a terraformed venus addon from the web and it looks great. the guy knew to put night lights on it as well hahaha. its interesting how he also made the clouds on venus really really thick. that seems realistic, but what do i know. i'm no scientist.

also, i am a HUGE fan of jame's cameron's avatar. so when i saw this badass addon for an avatar system on the celestia motherlode, i got it right away. well turns out it wasnt working for me, or i didnt follow the instructions very well, because the system doesnt show up in celestia. so i tinted jupiter close to what polyphemus looks like, and i "terraformed" europa into a pandora-like moon. i used the inherent "jurata" maps for it. i just made copies of them all, scaled them down to fit europa, tweaked the atmosphere settings, and even made a nightlight map for it; my attempt at what the bioluminescence of pandora would look like. there is a problem though, as one major continent is not showing any lights and part of another is not showing lights either. i'll fix that later (pic below)
(side note: if anyone knows of a good avatar system addon that works and is realistic and as accurate as possible, please let me know. i'd still love to have the polyphemus system orbiting rigil kentaurus a with all those other cool planets as well. and polyphemus' other moon that has oceans and plant life on it. very interesting!)

well here are some pics of my custom solar system:
(sorry they're all small. didnt wanna destroy the topic page. i guess just click them in a new tab if you want to see them up close. like the night light ones. check those out they're cool )

description:
picture:

europa "pandorized" in the sunlight

europa and jupiter both cresting. i think this one is nice.

what jupiter would look like in the sky of europa where the sun is rising

europa nightside with the clouds rendered. you can see some bioluminesence. i might need to mess with it. it looks kinda fake.

theres that continent i was talking about without any lights on it. i did put lights on that continent so i dont know why they're not showing up...

here you can see the crest of jupiter as it approaches eclipsing the sun. apparently jupiter eclipses the sun from the surface of europa for about 2 and a half hours like everyday or something like that. pretty crazy.

europa sky during the daytime. maybe because the sun is so far away you'd be able to see the planets or some stars in the daytime without the sun blocking them out?? doubt it but who knows? just gotta turn on your planet and stars view options lol

this is the terraformed mars in sunlight. very beautiful. all those craters filled with water. the planet of a million lakes.

there's the mars colonies and cities thriving on martian soil. it was really fun making all those little lights.

an alternate view of mars at night. i wanted to showcase some really cool city and town/colony structures that i am proud of making.

the terraformed moon in sunlight. just like mars with all those awesome crater-lakes. a fisherman's dream lol

once again i made the moon populated. lots of lights surrounding craters because i think that if people really did live on a terraformed moon, with all those beautiful crater-lakes, everyone would want to live right next to one.

this is the terraformed venus addon i downloaded and installed. very beautiful. tons of clouds. i really like that feature. i mean it looks nice from space, but it'd probably be kinda annoying on the surface, no? lol who knows.

a view of venus without the suffocating clouds. very pretty. very... reflective.

the backside of venus. the clouds blot out alot of the night lights that were included.

so i took the clouds off to show the night lights. beautiful.


so if i need to cite where/who i got these skins/addons/maps/textures from, please let me know.
i am not taking credit for anything but the night lights on mars, the moon, and europa. i made those myself from scratch. lol i really like doin it. let me know if you want me to make you a night light map. i'd love to do it for you.

let me know what you think guys thanks!

--- edit ---

john Van Vliet wrote:
that might be the size of the night map
on MS windows - mostly, the 3d card might not support big maps
MS has this very bad habit of REMOVING the openGL code from there Nvidia drivers
the ATI/AMD cards are a bit ify on opengl support and is worse if you get it from the windows updates

so if on windows with a nvidia card
do a FULL uninstall of the driver in "safe mode" and install the one from the nvidia web site
same goes for ati cards

besides the driver if it is a built in "chip" ( for a laptop on a desktop) it will NOT support big night maps nor big cloud maps

if a desktop buy a full 3d card

from the look of the screen shots this looks like a OLD xp install
there is not much support for xp and a lot of the old hardware for xp no longer has support

so if you could post the OS and the hardware specs

well the night map is only 1024x512, 148k, .png, so i don't know why it would be too big or anything. there are larger textures in celestia.

lol yea not really that old. just windows xp from a year or two back. i prefer xp over vista or 7 cuz its alot simpler.

anyway



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

side note: how come nobody makes add-ons for celestia anymore??
i can't find any new ones anywhere. i want more stars and 3d nebulae lol

--- edit ---

john Van Vliet wrote:so it is a acre one laptop

a laptop is VERY VERY VERY different than a desktop tower

and is that service pack 1 ?( according to that screen shot "build 2600" )
-- if so ---
xp service pack one IS NOT SUPPORTED ,not even by Microsoft .
install service pack 3 -- NOW
sp1 has KNOWN security holes in it .


as to image size
on laptops it is more the number AND size

for example Earth
texture
night map
cloud map
specular map

a 512x256 night map might be the max. with that many maps on the built in chip.

side note: how come nobody makes add-ons for celestia anymore??
i can't find any new ones anywhere. i want more stars and 3d nebulae lol

What ?????????
I test 5 or 6 every week or two

i want more stars

there is the star database "Version 2.1 C" on the motherload
BUT some of it is incompatible with celestia 1.6.1

alright i will look for that package. idk what it does or what it even is, but i will get it if you think i should.

yea but there are larger textures in my celestia. i mean look at my mars. all of its textures work fine. same number of textures as europa has. i made the night map the same way i made the others. oh well i guess i'll try again and see if that doesnt fix it lol

please show me where to find more awesome addons. i really don't want that 1billion or 2 billion star catalog because most of the locations arent accurate and i've heard theyve got other problems as well. plus i dont know where the stars are added. just in the milky way? do the catalog addons fill out the entire milky way or just certain parts or one part? idk

learning how to create stars on my own is a pain. this site "http://lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/addon-intro.html" is way too complicated for me. if it were simpler to understand, i'd already have an entire galaxy made by now. i just get bogged down with all the lingo and lack of examples and detailed explanations.

thank you for replying anyway. just wanted to show off my first attempt at "modding" i guess.
guess this topic is dead

It's only dead if you want it to be.

The 1- and 2-million star addons are about as accurate as they can be, given the information available. They're taken from the Tycho catalog, which contains those stars which had their positions and spectra measured by the Hipparcos satellite, but which did not have their parallaxes measured. As a result, their distances had to be estimated from their apparent brightnesses and spectral types, including some estimates of dimming due to interstellar gas and dust clouds. The stars they include all are in the Milky Way and relatively nearby, although there are many distant ones included because of their brightness.

John tends to be overly pessimistic about what Microsoft provides. However, Celestia does depend on the OpenGL graphics drivers being bug-free. Except for a very few special cases, it does not include workarounds for driver bugs. This means that when you encounter problems with 3D graphics, the first thing you should do is download and install the most recent drivers available from the manufacturer of your graphics hardware. These days, that usually means Nvidia, AMD or Intel, although there are one or two other companies producing graphics chipsets. Also, some models of laptop are designed in ways which prevent the generic drivers from working, so you have to use the most recent drivers provided by the company which made the laptop. In all cases, though, the drivers are free.

I'll look into updating the Intro-to-Addons document. There are some simplifications which can be made due to changes in the most recent versions of Celestia.