Herschel and Planck add-ons

[BrianJ]

Hi,
my first attempt at creating a complete Celestia add-on is available for beta-testing by anyone who's interested. Suggestions for improvements, or additional features are welcome :-)

Temporarily available for download from the following links (I'll upload to the Celestia Motherlode in due course, if it's of acceptable standard and it works OK for other folks)

Herschel spacecraft - .3ds model and .jpg textures, .ssc file, .xyz file, readme.txt
EDIT: ** Uploaded to Celestia Motherlode - link removed **

Planck spacecraft - .3ds model and .jpg textures, .ssc file, .xyz file, readme.txt
EDIT: ** Uploaded to Celestia Motherlode - link removed **

Thanks to Selden for his help, and BrainDeadBob and ElChristou for pointing the way with "Dawn"

Cheers,
Brian

[selden]

Both Addons look quite reasonable to me!

[symaski62]

celestia 1.6.0 RC1

Herschel spacecraft OK

Planck spacecraft OK

---------------------------------
celestia 1.5.1
Herschel spacecraft ??

Planck spacecraft ??

[Chuft-Captain]

celestia 1.5.1
Herschel spacecraft ??

Planck spacecraft ??

Celestia SVN4679:

Herschel spacecraft OK

Planck spacecraft OK

Thanks BrianJ

[BrianJ]

Hi,
thanks for the feedback.

celestia 1.5.1
Herschel spacecraft ??

Planck spacecraft ??

I'm using the standard download version 1.5.1 and all seems well here - anyone else having problems using the add-ons with version 1.5.1?

I see ESA's own model of Planck is available (although with a small bug, which I assume will be corrected soon enough) so I guess I'll leave it to someone else to make that generally available to folks in due course. I wonder if they will make a model of Herschel available also? I'll wait a while and see. Nice to see both ESA and NASA starting to make some models of their spacecraft available.

I have a few questions while I'm here:

Do people generally prefer more "representational" models of spacecraft - without the "artistic" textures for solar panels, insulation, etc? Most of the spacecraft models on the Motherlode don't seem to use textures.

How do I get the spacecraft axes and velocity vector to show in Celestia?

It would be nice to have some kind of representation of the field of view of the spacecraft visible in Celestia (for Planck anyway, I'm not sure what the FOV of Herschel is). Anyone have any thoughts or pointers as to if or how that could be done?

Thanks,
Brian

[Chuft-Captain]

Do people generally prefer more "representational" models of spacecraft - without the "artistic" textures for solar panels, insulation, etc? Most of the spacecraft models on the Motherlode don't seem to use textures.

For spacecraft that actually exist, I personally think the more realistic the better, but I have no objections to alternative interpretations. It's easy to upgrade the textures at any time anyway. Also, absolute realism is difficult in Celestia due to some fundamental limitations in the rendering eg. lack of shadow casting etc. (These limitations are partly of course because of having to render in realtime).

How do I get the spacecraft axes and velocity vector to show in Celestia?

Right mouse click on the object and you'll see the options for showing bodyframe and reference frame vectors.

It would be nice to have some kind of representation of the field of view of the spacecraft visible in Celestia (for Planck anyway, I'm not sure what the FOV of Herschel is). Anyone have any thoughts or pointers as to if or how that could be done?

Have a look at Selden's Hale Telescope addon for inspiration.

CC

[selden]

Displaying the field-of-view isn't particularly obscure:

I made models which have shapes based on drawings of the fields of view and placed them at a large distance (100km?) relative to the telescope with a Radius that made them be drawn with the right size when viewed from the telescope's viewpoint. In principle one could use a simple square model with a transparent version of the the field-of-view drawing as a surface texture, but Celestia has some problems drawing transparent objects.

[BrianJ]

Thanks for the replies (and patience with newbie questions - I really must read the User's Guide more carefully!)

I made models which have shapes based on drawings of the fields of view and placed them at a large distance (100km?) relative to the telescope with a Radius that made them be drawn with the right size when viewed from the telescope's viewpoint.

That's the kind of solution I can get my head around. I have your Hale Telescope on-board, I'll take a look at how it's implemented.

Cheers,
Brian

[BrianJ]

Alternative .xyz and .ssc files for the Herschel and Planck add-ons (available from Celestia Motherlode)

Shows the orbits in a "rotating frame" where the Sun-Earth line is constant with regard to the orbit reference frame.

Available here:
Herschel:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/briansutilit ... _frame.zip
Planck:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/briansutilit ... _frame.zip
(warning! these will overwrite the original .ssc files for the add-ons, so you may like to back them up)

[Cham]

I have much improved the appearence of these models, for my personal taste (smoother curves). The originals were way too crude (low res polygonal) for Celestia. Some previews :





Planck:
http://fsgregs.startlogic.com/Public_Fi ... Planck.zip (784 KB)

Herschel:
http://fsgregs.startlogic.com/Public_Fi ... rschel.zip (676 KB)

[planck2007]

I have tried the addon in my Ubuntu (9.10) machine with Celestia 1.6.0, but the FOV is not displayed and my impression is that it is a problem related to the CMOD model. The planck_fov.ssc file is correcly present.

So the questions are: is anyone aware of a way to make the fov be displayed under linux? Alternatively, is there any software to convert CMOD into 3ds? I found one for windows (http://web.t-online.hu/karpo/) but the demo version does not include conversion from CMOD to 3ds

Thanks for any help

Aniello