2K earth clouds map moving WITH SHADOWS !!

[ElChristou]

Hello,

Here is a quick preliminary 2k cloudsmap for small systems... with shadows...
After reading the Don. Edwards post on his overlay trick (much more for big systems), I had the idea of adding a shadow directly to the clouds in the png file... Yet it's not true shadows... ... but the illusion is quite good.



Meanwhile I end this work, the preliminary 2k map (3.2mg) can be downloaded HERE.

Comments are welcome.

Bye

[Don. Edwards]

Hey ElChristou,
I too played with this technique at first. It does work somewhat. But you are limited to the clouds being locked directionally on the surface. That means if you look at the Earth from the right angle all will look fine. But then flip to the other side and there go the shadows or worse everything just plain looks wrong.
I am afraid that we are stuck with either this way of doing cloud shadows or the more intensive way of a shadow map until Chris can get cloud shadows working in Celestia. Something he said he was working on well over a year ago. Maybe we will see them for version 1.5. Who knows at this point if there will ever be a 1.5 build?

Don. Edwards

[ElChristou]

Hey ElChristou,
I too played with this technique at first. It does work somewhat. But you are limited to the clouds being locked directionally on the surface. That means if you look at the Earth from the right angle all will look fine. But then flip to the other side and there go the shadows or worse everything just plain looks wrong....

Yes I know... it's really not the utlimate solution...
I wanted to do something light for small systems...
The other problem is that on the 2k map, the shadow has been moved 2px to the right, 1px to the bottom... the result is that the visual distance between clouds and shadows/ground is too important...

It was just for the fun... don't know if I will finish the map...

...Who knows at this point if there will ever be a 1.5 build?

Dont be pessimist... we will have not only a 1.5 but one day a 6.0 !

Bye