New alternate flare.jpg

Tips for creating and manipulating planet textures for Celestia.
Avatar
Topic author
Cham M
Posts: 4324
Joined: 14.01.2004
Age: 60
With us: 20 years 10 months
Location: Montreal

New alternate flare.jpg

Post #1by Cham » 05.01.2005, 20:05

I wasn't really satisfied of the default flare.jpg, in the base textures directory. The spikes and the halo (lense flare) are often in the way, at close range, and what frustrate me the most is the graniness (or bands effect) of the shades, which feels a bit crude at close range. So I just made three altenate flare.jpg and I need your opinion on them. Please, drag'n drop the pictures below to your desktop, try them and tell me what you think. Which one feels the most narural ? Which one is the smoothest (less grains in the shades). I think I prefer the third one.

Image

The second flare was created by fsgregs, but I've edited a bit, because I found it too weak.
Image

Image
"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin", thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

Avatar
Topic author
Cham M
Posts: 4324
Joined: 14.01.2004
Age: 60
With us: 20 years 10 months
Location: Montreal

Post #2by Cham » 05.01.2005, 20:47

I think the third one is a bit too big. I made it a bit weaker, so do you think this is a good one ?

Image
"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin", thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

Bob Hegwood
Posts: 1048
Joined: 19.10.2003
With us: 21 years 1 month
Location: Germantown, Ohio - USA

Post #3by Bob Hegwood » 09.01.2005, 17:38

With many thanks to Cham, Frank Gregorio, Don Edwards, and Grant
Hutchison, I've collected eight different flare textures for use with Celestia.

You can now choose whichever texture meets your particular tastes.

You can find this package either on the "Other" page on my web site, or
you should be able to get it from the Motherlode.

Always nice to have a choice, don't you think? :wink:

Thanks, Bob
Bob Hegwood
Windows XP-SP2, 256Meg 1024x768 Resolution
Intel Celeron 1400 MHz CPU
Intel 82815 Graphics Controller
OpenGL Version: 1.1.2 - Build 4.13.01.3196
Celestia 1.4.0 Pre6 FT1

Tanketai
Posts: 86
Joined: 06.01.2005
With us: 19 years 10 months
Location: Brasil

Post #4by Tanketai » 14.01.2005, 03:10

What about this one? I took the plus-sign original from mr. Mcwoods, in the motherlode, doubled it and added a small lens flare effect on the side. As I said, commenting the original in the motherlode, it looks great on clusters, specially the Rosette nebula.

Image
It's not so pretty on close range, but looks good behind a planet, like in a sunrise-from-space shot.
:D

Brendan
Posts: 296
Joined: 15.07.2003
With us: 21 years 4 months
Location: Bellows Falls, VT
Contact:

Post #5by Brendan » 14.01.2005, 09:04

The newest version of BCelestia can reload star flare textures and set it with the FlareTexture option in celestia.cfg. Now it's easier to compare flare textures. 8)

http://www.rit.edu/~bjr5096/celestia/BCelestia.html

Brendan

Vincent
Developer
Posts: 1356
Joined: 07.01.2005
With us: 19 years 10 months
Location: Nancy, France

Post #6by Vincent » 14.01.2005, 11:12

Tanketai : "It's not so pretty on close range, but looks good behind a planet, like in a sunrise-from-space shot"


That's why it would be nice that at a distance of nearly 1 ly, a second flare would be used for closer range...

Is it possible ? :roll:


@+
Vincent
@+
Vincent

Celestia Qt4 SVN / Celestia 1.6.1 + Lua Edu Tools v1.2
GeForce 8600 GT 1024MB / AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core / 4Go DDR2 / XP SP3

Avatar
PlutonianEmpire M
Posts: 1374
Joined: 09.09.2004
Age: 40
With us: 20 years 2 months
Location: MinneSNOWta
Contact:

Post #7by PlutonianEmpire » 15.01.2005, 05:32

Here's my own flare. Personally, I like it best. :D

Image
Terraformed Pluto: Now with New Horizons maps! :D

Brendan
Posts: 296
Joined: 15.07.2003
With us: 21 years 4 months
Location: Bellows Falls, VT
Contact:

Post #8by Brendan » 15.01.2005, 09:56

Vincent wrote:Tanketai : "It's not so pretty on close range, but looks good behind a planet, like in a sunrise-from-space shot"


That's why it would be nice that at a distance of nearly 1 ly, a second flare would be used for closer range...

Is it possible ? :roll:


It is not possible now. To do that, we'd need to find how to get the distances to the stars and have more than one flare texture and how to apply the textures according to distance.

Brendan

Brendan
Posts: 296
Joined: 15.07.2003
With us: 21 years 4 months
Location: Bellows Falls, VT
Contact:

Post #9by Brendan » 15.01.2005, 10:01

I have lots of flare textures now, so I decided to put them in a flares folder in the textures folder and change the FlareTexture option in celestia.cfg. I found that Celestia crashes when the flare file has a space in its filename.

Brendan

DJ_Night
Posts: 51
Joined: 17.04.2003
With us: 21 years 7 months
Location: Stockholm / Sweden

Post #10by DJ_Night » 15.01.2005, 10:52

Greetings to the celestia community,

here is my personal favorite, looks realistic with small amount of lens flare added to it, try it out, maybe you like it, cheers...

Image

[Edit] direct linking does not seem to work on the webhost above, image is now temporary hosted on "imageshack.us" , thanks PlutonianEmpire for the tip [/Edit]
Last edited by DJ_Night on 15.01.2005, 15:32, edited 2 times in total.

Avatar
PlutonianEmpire M
Posts: 1374
Joined: 09.09.2004
Age: 40
With us: 20 years 2 months
Location: MinneSNOWta
Contact:

Post #11by PlutonianEmpire » 15.01.2005, 10:56

It doesn't work: the link just redirects me to the main page.

Use http://www.imageshack.us instead.
Terraformed Pluto: Now with New Horizons maps! :D

danielj
Posts: 1477
Joined: 15.08.2003
With us: 21 years 3 months

Post #12by danielj » 15.01.2005, 12:08

What is BCelestia?

Brendan wrote:The newest version of BCelestia can reload star flare textures and set it with the FlareTexture option in celestia.cfg. Now it's easier to compare flare textures. 8)

http://www.rit.edu/~bjr5096/celestia/BCelestia.html

Brendan

Bob Hegwood
Posts: 1048
Joined: 19.10.2003
With us: 21 years 1 month
Location: Germantown, Ohio - USA

Post #13by Bob Hegwood » 15.01.2005, 18:55

FYI...

Have added PlutonianEmpire's texture as well as Tanketai's...

There are now ten alternative flare textures included in the package.
That should be enough for anyone should it not? :wink:

Available on my site now (Under the "Other" button), and should be on the
Motherlode shortly.

Thanks, Bob
Bob Hegwood

Windows XP-SP2, 256Meg 1024x768 Resolution

Intel Celeron 1400 MHz CPU

Intel 82815 Graphics Controller

OpenGL Version: 1.1.2 - Build 4.13.01.3196

Celestia 1.4.0 Pre6 FT1

Michael Kilderry
Posts: 499
Joined: 11.10.2004
With us: 20 years 1 month
Location: London, UK

Post #14by Michael Kilderry » 16.01.2005, 09:49

I am currently creating my own flare texture to be included on the Lera fictional solar system download, when it is available I wouldn't mind if you extracted it from the Lera addon and added that to the flare collection.

Michael Kilderry :)
My shatters.net posting milestones:

First post - 11th October 2004
100th post - 11th November 2004
200th post - 23rd January 2005
300th post - 21st February 2005
400th post - 23rd July 2005

First addon: The Lera Solar System

- Michael


Return to “Textures”