New galaxy model, full of stars !

[Cham]

Here's a - fictious - ring shaped galaxy with arms, full of dust and Orion-like nebulae. The stars are mainly concentrated in the arms (the stars distribution fits the nebula model). It's not finished yet, but the rendering is already great.

galaxy1.jpg

galaxy2.jpg

[Cham]

More views, with Magn pushed to the max :

galac1.jpg

galac2.jpg

A view from the inside :

galact3.jpg

I'm not sure yet of what to do, for the central core. Maybe a simple yellowish blob full of stars...

[bh]

That's impressive! FPS?

[Cham]

FPS?

Well, on my 2009 Mac mini, it's a bit slow (it depends on the view. About 10 to 15 FPS in the worst case). On my 2010 13" MacBook Pro, it's much higher.

[bh]

That's super... prob too much for my mini... it's a 2006 and it's a bit tired. I get around 5FPS in Earth orbit!

[Cham]

Two more views from the inside (Magnitude isn't pushed to the max here). It's really fun to move inside this thing, especially when you slip in/out of the arms.

inside1.jpg

inside2.jpg

[Cham]

More stars...

There's a total of 90 000 stars in the ring galaxy (60 000 Main Sequence stars + 30 000 higher luminosity classes). The view is superb in Celestia, and the frame rate is pretty high, despite the scene complexity.

RU1.jpg

RU2.jpg

Super massive black hole in the middle. A central bulge is yet to come with a nebula.

[Cham]

There's a young star field in there !

RU6.jpg

RU7.jpg

On average, the distance between adjacent stars in this galaxy is roughly 100 LY.

[Reiko]

This is fantastic! I can not wait to see the finished product.

[Cham]

This is my source of inspiration for that annular galaxy :

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020909.html

hoag_hst_big.jpg

[Cham]

I'm adding more details and colors. The frame rate is decreasing a bit, but it's still fine on my 2009 Mac mini.

Some views to compare with the pictures posted above (click the images below for a large 1680 X 1050 view) :















If only Chris was implementing the bug fix I was asking since a long time, about the nebulae sprites rendering at very large distance (white dots)... This would allow a massive production of sprites based nebulae in Celestia !

[Cham]

I made the ring galaxy as a multi-layers object that can be toggled with a CELX script. This way, we can have several rendering of the same galaxy.

Here's the default representation, using a 256 X 256 custom PNG template (default rendering style in Celestia) :

RingUniverse.png

Unfortunately, this template needs to be placed in the base models folder, and isn't recognised by Celestia if it's placed in the extras folder.

Here's a preview of the default rendering in Celestia. The arms fits perfectly well with the stars distribution :

default.jpg

Here's the default template superposed with a part of the sprites model (the other part isn't shown here since we can't show more than three pictures in a message, and I'm too lazy to use my personnal server space ) :

superposed.jpg

I didn't made the central core yet.

[Cham]

I added the galactic core :

core1.jpg

core2.jpg

core3.jpg

EDIT : I released the addon there (download link) :

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=16649&p=128069#p128069