Celestia Forums

buggs_moran wrote:Wow, great work Andrea. I am toying with different ideas for the plumes. I might just do a static model to begin with and work from there...Thanks for all the hard work!
Chris

Happy you like it, Chris, you are welcome.
And thank you for kind words, but the hard work is yours, not mine, I've only made some digging in the Web, no more.
Bye

Andrea

Some time passed since last post on the subject, and I see no one tried to merge Chris' and Buggs' different approaches to show Io volcanic plumes.
Well, I did it, and here below is the result.
You can better see the improvement if you look at Buggs' and Chris' releases.
I feel it's very good, but to obtain it I had to make some changes, and exactly I dimmed and blurred a bit the blob.jpg texture and made more diffuse the plume.cmod in Chris' Io volcanic sprites addon.
Then I slightly modified the ssc files in both Chris' and Buggs' addons.
Hope you'll like it.
If you wish to test yourself, here are both modded addons:
http://ftp.tiscali.it/andrea_celestia/iovolcanoes-chrisandbuggs-mergedmoddedbyandrea.rar
Unrar and put both directories in your extras.
Hope you'll like it.
Bye

Andrea

And here two close-ups.
Bye

Andrea

Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

ElChristou wrote:Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

Thank you for appreciation, Christophe, sorry you cannot see it working, it's much better than still images.
Bye

Andrea

It?s awesome,but unfourtanetelly,is a bit too heavy in my system.Look at these pictures:
http://img20.imageshack.us/my.php?image ... rsijj4.jpg
http://img217.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... darhl7.jpg
http://img217.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... iacsg1.jpg
http://img382.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... ectdm4.jpg




But I manage to run the Iovolcanoes animation at 32X by not displaying anything except star,planets and atmospheres,at a frame rate of around 20 fps.The effect is spectacular.
Anyway,I have a doubt;Which Ionight is more realistic?The old one green and red or the new one?

ElChristou wrote:Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

Don't worry, Christophe: I will code a software path for point sprites soon.

--Chris

danielj wrote:It?s awesome,but unfourtanetelly,is a bit too heavy in my system..... But I manage to run the Iovolcanoes animation at 32X by not displaying anything except star,planets and atmospheres,at a frame rate of around 20 fps.The effect is spectacular.
Anyway,I have a doubt;Which Ionight is more realistic?The old one green and red or the new one?

Danielj, happy you can use and enjoy it, even if I think there are probably some settings in your system that make things worse than they should.
What Io texture are you using?
If I remember well, you always like to use the most detailed available textures, so I think you are using the 8k VT png one, correct?
I use a slightly modified 4k texture plus a 4k normal, both 8MB png, and I don't use night textures.
In my "Io volcanoes" show I don't have galaxies, asteroids belt, 1 million stars, all external Jupiter moons, etc., so I have the system as light as I can, and perfectly tailored for my needs.
This way I run always at 60 fps (I limited the maximum at this rate), but I doubt that the difference in our graphic cards can justify such an fps difference.
My suggestion is to clean-up your Celestia installation, to use more than one, and in each of them eliminate all what is not necessary for your needs.
I think you can run faster this way, give a try.
Bye

Andrea

There is a HUGE DIFFERENCE between your system and mine.This explains totally the difference in frame rate.My system is an Athlon 64 X2 3800,2 gb RAM and 7600 GT.You have a Quad core,4 GB of RAM and 8800 GTX.Just to have an idea,a basic Core2Duo is equivalente to an Athlon64 X2 5200!So it?s no use giving me these advices...if I am lucky,in june or july,I could change to an Athlon64 X2 5200 AM2,2 GB RAM DDR2 and Geforce 9600 GT.But will be difficult.Until then...

danielj wrote:There is a HUGE DIFFERENCE between your system and mine.This explains totally the difference in frame rate.My system is an Athlon 64 X2 3800,2 gb RAM and 7600 GT.You have a Quad core,4 GB of RAM and 8800 GTX.Just to have an idea,a basic Core2Duo is equivalente to an Athlon64 X2 5200!So it?s no use giving me these advices...if I am lucky,in june or july,I could change to an Athlon64 X2 5200 AM2,2 GB RAM DDR2 and Geforce 9600 GT.But will be difficult.Until then...

No, please Danielj, don't start once again with complaints about your system.
As many people told you up to now, it's way better than most of Celestian's systems, the problem is that you prefer complaint to advices follow-up.
Why don’t you try to obtain the best you can from what you have, instead crying on your poor (sic!) system?
Follow what I suggested, you'll see improvements, believe me.
And regarding the core duo- ter- quad and so on (BTW, round the corner there are the 8 core and even the 16 and 32 core systems, do you think we'll need them?), I fear that actually Celestia cannot use more than one core at a time, or two if, e.g., you use a music system together with Celestia.
The true big difference between our systems is perhaps that I can use 3.5 GB RAM, I agree, but, I repeat, this doesn't justify the enormous difference in frame rate betwen our systems.
When I was using cards that had problems with the most complex Celestia environments, I used to kill even the antivirus and almost all the stuff that's shown in the instruments bar or works continuously in background, sucking memory and speed to the system.
This worked.
So, make your experiments, with discoveries and mistakes, like all of us have done in the past and are doing even now.
Listen to what is discussed in this forum about hardware, and follow the suggestions if you think them trustworthy.
Danielj, this is only a suggestion, not a critic, I think that every man should freely decide his own actions, but, please, stop boring all of us with your system's continuous denigration, it’s not correct for all the people (a lot!) that have lower rated systems.
Bye

Andrea

ElChristou wrote:Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

Well, my friend, here is a little movie that can give you a better idea of the moving stuff.
http://ftp.tiscali.it/andrea_celestia/io_volcanoes-short.avi
To reduce its size I made it as 640x480 pixel, only 15 fps, in AVI format, so it's about 8.2 MB.
Hope you'll like it, give me your opinion, please.
Bye

Andrea

WOW! I'm even impressed with how cool that looks in the avi Andrea. Thanks for doing the work to combine our work! I wonder if you could try running a find and replace on the Emissive True statements in my ssc and make them # Emissive True to see what happens. I will try it at work tomorrow if I have time.

Sadly my computer has been showing signs (for a month) that it might be time for a new motherboard (you're not alone daniel ) and I cannot see these addons correctly. I am getting hangups even running Celestia concurrently with notepad and I think that might be an indicator of some underlying issues . I am in the process of backing everything up (I am too ADD to stay on that for very long though ). What a task, I am sure you can all relate...

buggs_moran wrote:WOW! I'm even impressed with how cool that looks in the avi Andrea. Thanks for doing the work to combine our work! I wonder if you could try running a find and replace on the Emissive True statements in my ssc and make them # Emissive True to see what happens. I will try it at work tomorrow if I have time.

I just tried it, Chris, and below you can see the results. I think that the emissive true should be maintained ON, if plumes are considered hot, or OFF if they are considered cold.
From a graphical point of view, the emitting plumes are way better, IMHO.

buggs_moran wrote:Sadly my computer has been showing signs (for a month) that it might be time for a new motherboard (you're not alone daniel ) and I cannot see these addons correctly. I am getting hangups even running Celestia concurrently with notepad and I think that might be an indicator of some underlying issues . I am in the process of backing everything up (I am too ADD to stay on that for very long though ). What a task, I am sure you can all relate...

I fully understand your sorrow, everytime I change configuration there are a lot of problems, backups to be done, new things to understand and study, changes to be applied, BIOS to be updated, and so on.
But at the end, you'll have a more efficient (and so more enjoyable!) system, so the effort is always worthwhile.
Good luck, Chris.
Bye

Andrea

chris wrote:

ElChristou wrote:Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

Don't worry, Christophe: I will code a software path for point sprites soon.

--Chris

Tx, but only if it's really useful; from my side soon or later I'll change my old (now) Powerbook...

ANDREA wrote:

ElChristou wrote:Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

Well, my friend, here is a little movie that can give you a better idea of the moving stuff.

Tx! I don't know why I had always imagined the point sprites animated... and they are static! No way to give them some paths?
Anyway considering the two technics here, the merge of both is really a good idea!

ElChristou wrote:

ANDREA wrote:

ElChristou wrote:Looks good to me! Too bad I cannot appreciate the thing in live, my config don't handle point sprites...

Well, my friend, here is a little movie that can give you a better idea of the moving stuff.

Tx! I don't know why I had always imagined the point sprites animated... and they are static! No way to give them some paths?

You are very welcome, as always.
And regarding your request, I absolutely agree: animated, smaller and more point sprites could probably give a perfect result.
Do you think it's possible to improve them this way, Chris? (Laurel, obviously).

ElChristou wrote:Anyway considering the two technics here, the merge of both is really a good idea!

Thank you Christophe, happy you appreciate it.
Bye

Andrea

Can't get it to work Cel 1.4.1 Put in Extras as instructed. See attachment.

Martin

Hello Marty,some suggestions:
1- this stuff works ONLY under 1.5 and following issues, NOT under 1.4.1;
2. it looks like you didn't check what I told here:
http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11829&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=60
and didn't use the directory I made available as follows:
http://ftp.tiscali.it/andrea_celestia/iovolcanoes-chrisandbuggs-mergedmoddedbyandrea.rar
And the image below shows how I have installed it in my Celestia Extras folder, click to see the image full size.
Hope this will help.
Bye

Andrea

buggs_moran wrote:I am pretty content with my redesign of the volcanic plumes that I recently released. Some of the changes include:
- A sulfur "snow" effect rather than the long tail ejecta (the old texture is included)
- I set all the plumes to be Emissive True so they show on the dark side as well. This is unrealistic, but I was having too much trouble.

I look forward to you critiques...once I make the final tweaks I will post to the Motherlode as well.

Buggs, this new version is perfect ! The plumes are now MUCH more nicely looking (feel more natural, now).

How "unrealistic" are they, on the dark side ? I don't see'em as unrealistic at all, since the hot (blue) sulfur is emitting light. I believe they are looking more realistic than with emissive set to OFF.

My only unimportant "critique" is about the SSC formatting. The spacements are random. For example :


should be this, instead (for the ease of reading) :



Oh, and I strongly suggest that you use the Class "diffuse" command, for all the plume model declarations, so we can't click on them and to turn OFF the planet shine effect.

Thanks Cham,

As far as unrealistic goes, I doubt the sulfur puts off that much light. There might be some diffuse glow there if you were standing on the night side surface, but the lava pools would be brighter. The reading I did in order to get a feel for these was unclear on how these would look on the night side... The Tvashtar image from the New Horizons probe, and as far as I know all of the other plume images, were enhanced to bring out the detail.

Your comments on the coding aren't much of a surprise. You should see my HTML, it's awful. I will look into reformatting it in the near future. (As Andrea knows, near future for me could mean months). I totally agree on the diffuse command. Perhaps I will look forward to a 1.6 release so it will work with a release version.