Celestia Forums

This might be hoping too much, but...

Is there a generator somewhere that creates random ring textures? I just can't seem to get the hang of making them....

...John...

I don't think the rings of the planets in your ArcBuilder's Universes look that bad, unless your using other people's ring textures, I'd say that youre not that bad at making ring textures. Ring textures aren't that hard to for me to make, but they can have unpredictable results .

I do not know of a generator that creates random ring textures, but your free to borrow the ring textures from my addon, The Lera Solar System!

Michael Kilderry

I can't help you on the random rings front, but you might get some useful info out of Bjorn Jonsson's Saturn Rings page

Yeah, the ring textures are borrowed, gathered ages ago from varous sources before I started my add-ons. I've been trying to make them from scratch since I started my project, but with horrific results.

I'll keep searching for a tutorial. I must have missed one somewhere.

...John...

John,

Google is your friend

Search for
planet rings tutorial
e.g.
http://www.deviantart.com/view/9266496/
http://www.solarvoyager.com/tutorials.asp

Celestia would use one radial row of pixels from one of these images.

Alternatively, you could create a translucent ring model and define it as a planet, specifying exactly the same orbital parameters as the planet it "orbits". There are some translucency bugs in Celestia v1.3.2 that might cause problems, though.

Selden - the rings tutorial on that Solar Voyager site is really cunning .

That looks like a great site in general... must peruse that more later!

Oh Evil One,

Well, that particular example produces a spiral instead of concentric rings, but presumably that's easily fixed. The idea of using a cloud generateor does sound appropriate.

http://www.SolarVoyager.com does seem to be one of the better space-art sites.

Spiral rings may be interesting. I've tried to make some for a black hole, but I didn't succeed. Is there a way to have a spiral ring in Celestia, with the Ring command, without using a mesh around a planet ?

**grumps** Some aspects of my Photoshop are jsut different enough to cause problems I suppose fiddling around with it will bring understanding, though. I've been Googling, though, looking for a Celestia-specific tutorial, but haven't found one yet.

Still, I'm closer than I was before. Thanks, guys!

...John...

John,

I'm sure there's no tutorial specfically for Rings in Celestia.

Rassilon might have some suggestions. I suspect he's created some for his various large planetary systems.

My own crude suggestion would be to generate an image of lots of tiny clouds which contains an opacity channel (up to 2K wide for Radeons, up to 4K wide for Nvidia cards) and cut a single scanline from that to use as your Ring texture. Swirling it, as suggested on the SolarVoyager site, would increase the apparent number of individual narrow rings.

Of course, the "right" way to do it would be with a numeric simulation that takes into account all the moons of your planet.

Personally I've got ok results out of using POV-ray's bozo texture, like this image. It shouldn't be too hard to rig something up to output a ring texture file, an orthographic camera projection should do the trick.

Wow. Did you render that entirely in POVRay? I'd love to know how you did that. (if you're willing to share, please PM me!)