Celestia Forums

Hello, everyone
Just thought i??d show you what i have been toying with lately...
The screenshot below is a small sample from a Titan concept i am working on.
It??s slow work, as i have less time than i??d like to do this right now...

Anyhow, to make this work, and look realistic, i had to build a plateau
400 meters above zero altitude, to avoid the infamous "atmosphere gap".
That means Huygen??s descent will terminate 400 meters higher than
jestr??s original XYZ file indicates. No other changes. Well, i am modding
the Huygens model a little to show some wear and tear from the
atmospheric conditions on the surface.

-rthorvald

Runar,

this looks gorgeous!

But what's the underlying philosophy? Is the Titan hires surface display very localized around the Huygens landing area or do you intend to model the whole Titan surface somehow close to the ground??

Bye Fridger

Nice!!
I'am not a Titan expert, so here is my stupid question:
The layer semi transparent represent something like a gaz or a liquid?

t00fri wrote:Is the Titan hires surface display very localized around
the Huygens landing area or do you intend to model the whole Titan
surface somehow close to the ground?

There will be several areas with very hi-res VTs, seamlessly integrated with
a complete 4096x2048 or possibly 8192x4096. This will make it possible
to zoom in on a given scene and have the impression of high resolution
everywhere.

The entire surface is, as you know, rather impractical to do:-)
(Not to speak of how fast - and badly - the map would age...)

ElChristou wrote:The layer semi transparent represent something like
a gaz or a liquid?

The translucent layer is mud/liquid methane. As i understand it, the
landing area was dry at the time, but had probably been wet recently.
There is also speculation that the probe sank partly into some such
material, so i decided to go for a semi-liquid surface; the scene looks
more natural with it.

-rthorvald

Here??s another shot - from a different location.
The scene in this screenshot shows a methane sea, with floating flakes
of methane ice on it. Notice Saturn??s rings in the upper left (the thin,
bright line): the sun reflects on them, making them visible through a
dense cloudlayer - but the disc of the planet remains invisible...

Of course, i am not using the default cloudmap, but still... It penetrates
*two* separate cloudlayers!



-rthorvald

Wow,looks cool,Runar

Very nice!

Those methane blocks of ice are a preliminary test? if not I think they need a bit more consistance...

Great, Runar!

it seems people have switched on the lights in their houses
visible in some distance. No wonder, it's pretty dark outside


Bye Fridger

Mmmh... Titan is going to be my favourite Saturn's satellite

So, are you going to try to match up the rocks in the lander's surface image to the terrain model in your first picture here?

ElChristou wrote:Those methane blocks of ice are a preliminary test?

The small ones were not textured yet when i took the screenshot, yes.

t00fri wrote:it seems people have switched on the lights in their houses
visible in some distance. No wonder, it's pretty dark outside

Yes, the dark "atmosphere" is exactly what i am after here. I am still
thinking hard, wondering if there??s a way to simulate rain...

As for the lights, they come from a problem with the normals on some
hard edges/creases in the rocks. It gets reflected wrong from some
angles - i am working on it.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:So, are you going to try to match up the rocks in the lander's surface image to the terrain model in your first picture here?

Actually, that was the very first thing i did, but it haven??t made it into the
scene above, at least not yet. I wanted to make a micro-scene in the
larger landscape where one could set the camera exactly where the photo
was taken... But stopped this work halfway, when the amount of detail i
wanted grew to about 100 mb in my work file for the rocks alone (that
would be something like 10-12 MB extra for the 3ds scenery, actually
doubling the weight of this particular model). I am still undecided.

Here??s a screen of where i left off:


-rthorvald

I don't think it's really worth doing a recreation of the surface photo, it's far too much detail and it's going to be very slow work to get everything in the right place (unless you have some means to reproject the surface photo image to a plan view, like the Mars lander imaging team does with their images. I wonder if that's been done for Huygens...).

But doing it by hand would be a nightmare I think.

rthorvald... just curious what modelling program you're using (looks like a Mac program, right?)

Thanks (and looks awsome BTW)

Steve aka Blinded

BTW, I should add that I really do like that landscape view. Hope you get those dodgy bright normals fixed!

BlindedByTheLight wrote:rthorvald... just curious what modelling program you're using (looks like a Mac program, right?)

Rthorvald is using Cheetah 3D...

Btw Rthorvald, have you ever tested Amapi Pro 7 ? Very good soft, very powerful and quite easy to use... It's my favorite modeler.

ElChristou wrote:have you ever tested Amapi Pro 7 ? Very good soft, very powerful and quite easy to use... It's my favorite modeler.

Yes, i tried Amapi about a year ago, when i was out shopping for 3D software. But the UI was a bit too clunky for my taste.

Cheetah3D is well thought out, very intuitive, has a clean Aqua interface, and is *much* faster than Amapi (at least on my system). The toolbox lacks a few features for working on grouped objects, but nothing i can??t live with. Also, the price is a real bargain compared to the other commercial packages for OSX.

-rthorvald

Yes at first sight, Amapi is a bit disconcertant, but in fact very efficient after few hours of work... The only problem is that this soft is ONLY a modeler, the rendering is just openGL. But for complex meshes... really great !!

Holy Crap, Runar, you keep outdoing yourself. What a great add-on. Can't wait until its done.

Hope it is not too large to run on a regular computer.

Frank

fsgregs wrote:Holy Crap, Runar, you keep outdoing yourself. What a great add-on

Thank you... But whether it will be great or bad remains to be seen... There??s still a long way to go...

fsgregs wrote:Hope it is not too large to run on a regular computer.

Well, it will be large - somewhere around 350-400 MB probably. But since surface textures takes up most of it, it will be easy to scale down, at the cost of resolution, of course. A light version around 20-30 MB ought to be feasible.

-rthorvald

Here??s a few more views... Huygens closing in:
The first one, looking up:


- This one looking down; the actual landing site is in the upper left of the frame. Only 71 km to go!


The landscape is a mix of high levels of a virtual texture and several 3ds models. Clouds are still rudimentary, though.

-rthorvald