Celestia Forums

Greetings Celestia Community.

Is it possible to improve the sun Flare & Atmosphere in celstia to make it look more realistic?

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I have added the sun as a separate texture in the solarsys.ssc and tested diffrent Atmosphere settings/colors and modified the flare.jpg texture but I dont end up with good/realistic results.


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I know that this issue has been taken up before, and lot of people are against "lens-flare effects and other un-realistic eye-candy effects. and I totally agree but appart from that there are lots of other realistic eye-candy effects that would defenitly spice up celestia without making it look "un-realistic", ex. better and more flexible Atmosphere, Galaxies, Planet-Rings, Smoke effects, Shadows, sun effects etc. etc...

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We all could voluntary donate money and help out at some point when needed, most of the people on this community are "programmers/game developers/computer tech/graphic designers etc. its a time taking process for just a few people to work with but not for the entire community, like the old proverb; saying .. 100 hands are stronger than 10.


#celestia up to the stars...

You can provide your own version of /celestia/textures/flare.jpg

I suspect that it is unlikely that any additional optical effects will be added to Celestia unless someone subnits code that implements it accurately and adjustably.

Money is not an issue. Priorities and the time to do the coding are.

I have tested diffrenet "flare" textures and made a few my self just to experiment. they look good from distance but not when you zoom closer or spin the sun, its hard to get good lens-flare effect because the flare "texture" is fixed and does not move when you rotate the sun.

This "flare" image below is from Nvidia "Nvchess"
and would ad great lens-flare effect if only the "flare" texture would move as you rotate the sun.

^^ the auto-log out system kicked me out again

Well I tried to post this earlier but the site went down for a while. At least it appeared that way to me.
Here is what the flare I use looks like.


I have always like the look of it better than the stock flare. Well at least I think so.

Here it is if you want to try it.


Don. Edwards

thanks Don for sharing that flare image. looks better and more realistic then the base flare. thumbs up.

Nice try,but I personally didn?t like.I don?t think it improved very much,but it?s my opinion.

Don. Edwards wrote:Well I tried to post this earlier but the site went down for a while. At least it appeared that way to me.
Here is what the flare I use looks like.


I have always like the look of it better than the stock flare. Well at least I think so.

Here it is if you want to try it.


Don. Edwards

I think the best sun effect wouldnt be a lens flare but a blurring of everything that comes near a powerful lightsource. Thats what happens in real life if you look at something very bright and it is implemented in most new games, so it can easily be done.

DJ_Night .... Here's one for you to try ...

Try out this one, its my favorite, looks bright and ads a smal tone of lens flare effect.

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looks like this in action...

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Paddywak >>tnx, huge flare, looks good in action, specially the innerflares, but the outer flares are just huge =)

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mmm...they all all look nice but I think the original idea is to make the 'flare' dynamic...so the degree of flare moves as you move...not a static image. It would also be nice to be able to turn this feature (when implemented) on or off.

Just thinking aloud.

Regards...bh.
(Alot of flight sims have this feature).

Hi DJ_Night,
Without the big outer flare ...

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bh >> I totally agree, a dynamic flare would defenitly look good and spice up celestia a bit. Like flight sims as you said the flares should look very bright/dazzling when you look directly at it and fade away when you change view. Lens flare is not needed then but would be nice as a extra option.
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Paddywak>> it looks great. =)

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Paddywak,

your new flare changed the old one too!

maxim.

Hi maxim,
You should always make backups before experimenting ...
Of course it will overwrite the original flare.jpg ... it has the same name !

Here is the original flare ... named originalflare.jpg ... rename it flare.jpg to get the original one back.



Here is a new one... for those that like a little colour....
again it will have to be renamed to flare.jpg if you want to use it in Celestia...

Paddywak wrote:Hi maxim,
You should always make backups before experimenting ...
Of course it will overwrite the original flare.jpg ... it has the same name !

No, baby.
What I meant was of course that every time you update your flare pic, all others you provided here in the thread change also (look above). So there is no chance to get the older ones.

maxim

My celestia crashed five times before I realized that I had put the flare image in another folder. Why would it crash without a flare pic? Is it so important to the program? weird...

All I'm seeing are Red-x's

EDIT: I have my own flare, but may be a while before I choose post it.