Does anyone know how to make an atmosphere for Ringworld?

[Rob Graham]

I'd like to add an atmosphere to Marc Griffith's Ringworld. Does anyone know how to make an atmosphere for an almost flat Ringworld section? How would you program this?

Thanks for any help,

Rob Graham

[JackHiggins]

I'd say you could open up one of the flat sections in a 3ds editor, and put another mesh surrounding it- then put a png texture on this mesh, which would get fainter the further away you get from the surface... Would something like that work? Celestia's standard atmospheres can only be spheres or ovoids, they dont wrap around 3ds objects....

[marc]

The width of the ringworld is 1.6Gm or 1,600,000 km
http://www.alcyone.com/max/reference/sc ... world.html

Earths atmosphere is only 50km thick. On the scale of things a similar atmosphere on ringworld would be hardly noticeable from space.
I could not even model the thickness of the ring (~300m) as 3Dstudio did not have the required precision. The rim walls however may be able to be modelled.

Jacks idea might work, but without some serious code changes i dont think there is any other way to add an atmosphere.
The surface texture does lack clouds, and the shadows cast by the shadow squares would be much better rendered using a vertex program (again custom code).

regards