Celestia Forums

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.



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

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 ?

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?

Thanks, Bob

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.


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

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.

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

Brendan

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 ?


@+
Vincent

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

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 ?

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

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

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...



[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]

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

Use http://www.imageshack.us instead.

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.

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

Brendan

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?

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

Thanks, Bob

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