Hi all,
despite the above-mentioned problems & bugs, it is still fun to try and exploit the present possibilities as much as possible,
concerning the approach through Titan's clouds towards the surface!
That's what I want to describe briefly next.
First of all, I adapted Titan's atmosphere layout to the actual data seen in the above NASA graph: I placed the yellow haze layer at 225 km above the surface with a total atmosphere height of 550km. Since at present, in Celestia cloud layers have
vanishing thickness, I placed the haze layer at 225 km, about midway between the lower (200) and upper (250) boundaries.
Here is my modified titan.ssc file that you may use instead of my original one in 'extras/titan':
Modify "Titan" "Sol/Saturn"
{
Texture "titan.png"
BumpMap "titan-bump.png"
BumpHeight 3.5
SpecularColor [ 0.15 0.15 0.15 ]
SpecularPower 25.0
Atmosphere {
Height 550
Lower [ 0.675 0.503 0.3 ]
Upper [ 1.0 0.745 0.444 ]
CloudHeight 225
CloudSpeed 100
CloudMap "titan-clouds.png"
}
}
There is one great advantage of the great height (10x Earth!) of Titan's atmosphere in Celestia: there is much more room
above ground to explore atmospheric views and still have a reasonably sharp/well defined surface view!
Moreover, I modified my 1k yellow haze layer (titan-clouds) of the Celestia 1.3.2 default distribution to include an
alpha-layer, which was carefully tuned: on the one hand, from a distance, Titan's surface cannot been seen through. On the other hand from right under the haze (200 km altitude) both Saturn and the sun can /just/ be made out very dimly! This setup conforms to the latest findings from
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1378
wherupon after some image processing of some
visible-light images, slight surface details could be made out through the haze. It also conforms to my old personal estimates as to the visible light transmission...
This new 1k 'titan-clouds.png' may be downloaded from here:
http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/titan-clouds.png
Just add it into the extras/titan/textures/medres directory.
Finally, I made a quite sophisticated
new titan-bump.png file. In absense of any genuine altitude information, the challenge was to produce a bump-map file from the existing imaging information that was
extremely smooth and reproduces the typical 3d impressions we got from photos...
Here is the URL for download:
http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/titan-bump.png
OK and finally, here is a resulting
view of the Huygens landing environment from 200 km altitude above Titans surface, i.e. from just under the lower yellow haze boundary. When the whole thing is animated, the slight texturing of the moving haze layer gives a nice "windy" impression with beautiful light effects from the slight inherent transparency of the haze layer...
or nearby from another perspective and exposing a bit the 'bumpy' but /smooth/ terrain
Enjoy,
Bye Fridger
)