Atmospheric dawn-shines, fog, and lens flares

[t00fri]

The effects you see in the saver are pure 2D. You can't do this simple by adding haze fog , wich fog any way i do not see with my Gf2. Btw the screen saver can really pretend for photorealism, whatever it means. I have seen many photos of the Earth from space and must admit that BlueMarble images are really cartoon-like.

I am not sure whether I understood precisely your sentences above. But let me say what I can do:

I take my transparency layer (alpha) for the clouds and /cut/ it off at some threshold (5-10%). That emulates some "haze" because even when there are no clouds, there is still "something" left over. Now if you use a light blue color in addition for that part, the effect is not too dissimilar to what is seen on the screensaver.

I tried it.

Bye Fridger

[Rassilon]

Ive seen some space shots where the clouds almost have a dirty look or somewhat yellowish in hue...That was something like 20 degrees to sunset...

[Rassilon]

Heres what I did with Celestia...I need to find a good map of the ocean floor to really spice things up...I only wish that I could make the planet haze thicker than a setting of 1...

http://cybermindtraveller.freewebspace.com/pics/earth-new.jpg

Its still a bit bland on the oceans...but Fridgers idea of cloud haze was the hot tip

[t00fri]

Heres what I did with Celestia...I need to find a good map of the ocean floor to really spice things up...I only wish that I could make the planet haze thicker than a setting of 1...

http://cybermindtraveller.freewebspace.com/pics/earth-new.jpg

Its still a bit bland on the oceans...but Fridgers idea of cloud haze was the hot tip :)

Ras: Yes that looks already quite cool...

Bye Fridger

[Pixel]

If you own GF-3 or 4 you already should be able to see atmospheric haze implemented by Chris:
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
However i am not sure that by haze or clouds you can simulate the effects seen near earth corona. In the saver, they do this by applying ring textures (flares) over earth shape.

Rassilon, why do you need ocean bumpmaps? Heh.

[Rassilon]

Not really a bumpmap I need...more of a map of the ocean floor...to give the ocean a bit of detail...

[IlyaG]

Wow, now that Earth looks so much better... you mind putting it up for download somewhere?

[Stargazer_2098]

Rassilon:


Great work on that Earth texture!
I'm afraid I can't help you with that ocean-map, but try visiting nasa at http://www.nasa.gov and try searching for ocean or something like it.
Keep up the great work!


Stargazer.

[Pixel]

Not really a bumpmap I need...more of a map of the ocean floor...to give the ocean a bit of detail...

here are the bathymetry maps :
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globega2.shtml

[Paul]

Rassilon, what sort of process did you apply to the Earth texture? Was it more than just decreasing the colour saturation?

People keep bagging the Blue Marble texture, but frankly the only difference I can see between the Blue Marble texture and these 'photorealistic' ones, is that the colour saturation is slightly lower.

[Rassilon]

Yeah I did that...and added a bit of texturing to the oceans thanks to Pixel...
http://cybermindtraveller.freewebspace.com/pics/earth-new2.jpg
^ You can notice a bit around the continents where the detail is better...

d/l...Be warned 6.5meg download...
http://cybermindtraveller.freewebspace.com/files/earth.zip

This is the script I used for this earth rendering...

Code: Select all

"Earth" "Sol"
{
   Texture "earth2k.png"
   NightTexture "earthnight.png"
   Color [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularColor [ 0.6 0.66 0.88 ]
   SpecularPower 35.0
   HazeColor [ 0.4 0.4 1 ]
   HazeDensity 1
   Radius 6378
   Atmosphere {
      Height 60
      Lower [ 0.5 0.5 0.65 ]
      Upper [ 0.3 0.3 0.6 ]
      Sky [ 0.3 0.6 0.9 ]
      CloudHeight 7
      CloudSpeed 65
      CloudMap "earth-clouds.png"
   }

   CustomOrbit "vsop87-earth"
   EllipticalOrbit {   
      Period            1.0000
      SemiMajorAxis     1.0000
      Eccentricity      0.0167
      Inclination       0.0001
      AscendingNode   348.739
      LongOfPericenter 102.947
           MeanLongitude   100.464
   }

   RotationPeriod   23.9344694 # 23.93419
   RotationOffset   280.5    # offset at default epoch J2000
   Obliquity        -23.45
   Albedo            0.30
}


[Stargazer_2098]

Rassilon:



GREAT WORK!

That new Earth is some improvement from the old one. Exellent work!

I got one problem tough: night-lights. I can't get them to work after having installed those new textures, must have been something I have done wrong as i see the night-textures is included in your script.


Stargazer.

[Rassilon]

Not sure...Mine work but I use Blue Marble's night lights...

Also I noticed a flaw in my new textures...I will be updating and reupping soon...

[Rassilon]

Ok fixed...Heres the download...

http://cybermindtraveller.freewebspace.com/files/earth%20ver%202.zip

[IlyaG]

LOL, my framerate went down to less than 1 frame per second with this texture!

I know my computer is really pathetic, what with only a 1.33ghz CPU and a GeForce 2 card, but can you make the texture less detailed (but having the same colors) so that the program doesn't freeze up for 50 seconds at a time to render Earth while you slowly rorate around it?

The colors look more realistic than the blue marble image (though why do the deserts in Africa have a green glow about them?), but the detail is far too great for any practical uses for Celestia users.

Also, stargazer is right. Night lights simply do not show up.

[Rassilon]

Well its possible that the two textures are too much for the memory on your card and it cannot load night lights...at some point I will make a lower res earth texture...

Africa deserts are altered a bit but not to green...It is more than likely the clouds causing that illusion on the eyes

[Miserableman]

I know my computer is really pathetic, what with only a 1.33ghz CPU and a GeForce 2 card

lol

[Matt McIrvin]

I take my transparency layer (alpha) for the clouds and /cut/ it off at some threshold (5-10%). That emulates some "haze" because even when there are no clouds, there is still "something" left over. Now if you use a light blue color in addition for that part, the effect is not too dissimilar to what is seen on the screensaver.

That's a great idea... I tried a more radical version: jacking up that threshold high enough that I could get rid of the "Sky" color in solarsys.ssc and just use the blue transparency to provide daytime sky glow.

I don't have screen grabs at the moment, but it's not bad. It makes even the Blue Marble texture look less cartoonish (just by blueing everything out), but it also improves the daytime view from the ground in some ways. The main drawback is that the Sun looks bluer than convention usually dictates. But if you turn off ambient lighting entirely, the daytime Moon looks great.

[Pixel]

For you experimentators over there:

http://www.noirextreme.com/digital/digital001122.htm
http://personal.southern.edu/%7Edascott//tutorial01/nasa-earth.htm

[t00fri]

For you experimentators over there:

http://www.noirextreme.com/digital/digital001122.htm
http://personal.southern.edu/%7Edascott//tutorial01/nasa-earth.htm

Hey, this looks interesting /and/ useful! Thanks.

Bye Fridger