Celestia Now Has Pseudo-Cloud Shadows!!!!!!!!

[Guest]

where is the matching could texture to use with this shadow?

[BlindedByTheLight]

Don, I know it's been a while but any reason you can see why I couldn't just have an SSC file like thus:

Modify "Earth" "Sol"

{
OverlayTexture "8k-CloudShadowMap.dds"


Atmosphere {

CloudHeight 7
CloudSpeed 0
CloudMap "Realistic_Earth_clouds.dds"
}

}

...which has the benefit of working with whatever texture I have already loaded. I'm assuming Celestia will pull all the other info (haze, sunset) from the original solarsys.scc. It SEEMS to work okay. Thoughts?

[Don. Edwards]

I really don't know. I have been rather slow with adopting Celestia's newer scripting system. Heck I still dump all my textures into the medres folder and I am using an install that is other 9 months old. I just haven't had the time to work at this level. If it works for you on OS X than I think that it should work that way for everyone. I don't always leave my cloud shadows on as the added texture believe it or not overheats my system and it shuts down. The CPU thermal sensor on my motherboard is getting a little wanky as it ages. But I think I may give this a try. I haven't released the shadowmap for my new clouds as of yet. Believe it or not it is harder to make the shadows than it is to make the cloudmaps. It is a balance of how dark to how tranperent to make them. It takes me always at least five good shots before I get it right as no two cloadmaps are the same. I am still hoping Chris can and will get cloud shadows and bumpmaping in the next release. But than it was mentioned that may happen several releases ago. As soon as he gets this feature added then cloud shadow maps can go the way of the Dodo bird.


Don. Edwards

[BlindedByTheLight]

I definitely believe the shadows overhearts the system. My processor clock thingy shoots WAY up when I use. And I bet it's a bitch to make the shadows, too. I imagine anything cloud-related is tough.

So far, it seems like the SSC I wrote works like a charm. Of course, the only thing I've noticed is that the cloud map stays on earth even if I switch to alternate textures... but the overlay disappears - which kinda makes sense b/c AltTextures cannot declare (or, I would assume, affect) Atmosphere declarations - but they CAN declare Overlays... so switching to an alternate texture would knock out the overlay.

In any case, don't let the above paragraph make it sound like I have ANY idea what I'm actually doing...

[PlutonianEmpire]

for some reason, i cant see ANY of the images on this thread...

[selden]

Note the age of the postings that included the pictures. I suspect they're long gone.

[PlutonianEmpire]

Note the age of the postings that included the pictures. I suspect they're long gone.

You're right. My bad.

thanks for pointing that out, selden.

[Don. Edwards]

Sorry guys, I must have inadvertantly deleted the files a while back.
Here are a few new shots sowing off the effect.

First clouds withoout shadows.


Then with shadow overlay texture.


Another shot without.


And another with.


I hope this is what you were looking for when it came to the pixtures.

Don. Edwards

[PlutonianEmpire]

Kewl!

thanks Don.

[Giorgio]

Hallo everybody.
I'll try to cut it short. It's some months now I'm using Celestia, needless to say it's the most beautiful piece of software I've ever laid my eyes on. The fact that such a thing is freeware, is just plain unbeliveable.
Anyway, I guess I'll talk about how amazed I am another time, now back to the topic of this thread.
Just the other day I found I can use 4k and+ .dds files, even though I have an ATI powered graphic card. I thought the 2k size limit for ATI was for every file format.
Anyway, I tried your clouds and shadows, and they're just excellent. Very subtle and yet effective, it adds a nice 3d effect on the surface and doesn't interfere with the nightlights map being a soft gray semi-transparent layer. Then your cloud map, which has a great looking light blue layer that makes up for my ATI being unable to create haze effects in Celestia, adds to every picture some more realism.
If just your clouds where a nice VT at 16k like those by D.Brady. The shadows make me want to take some close shots, but the relatively low resolution keeps me pretty far away from the surface, where Jester MkII Earth's VT would give the best results.

[danielj]

Do I have to put speed to 0,to see the pseudo shadows of the clouds,even know that my video card support 4k cloud maps?

[Giorgio]

Cloud shadow is an overlay map, so I guess it should be stationary. No movement at all. So 0 for cloud speed in solarsys.ssc
If you're not convinced try to copy your cloud speed settings under the string for the cloud shadow map and see what happens.

Anyway moving clouds add nothing to realism since it has nothing of the real movements of real clouds, just a texture that rolls around the earth without ever changing, so I don't think you really lose anything by setting it at 0 for good. The better qaulity of hi res cloud maps, being it a 4k+ .dds or a 16k o 32k virtual texture should largely make up for them being stationary.

Anyway, what graphic card do you have? Perhaps you could use even larger\more detailed versions of D.Edwards clouds and shadows.

[TheStressPuppy]

Hiya Don,

I know this is an old thread, but i just wanted to comment on the excellent work done here. I use both your earth, and mars textures as primarys. Hope to see some more work like this in the future from you.

[Don. Edwards]

Thanks for the kind words. There is quite a bit cooking and I should have some of it ready soon.

[BobHegwood]

Just curious here...

Are cloud shadow maps still overlay textures? Or, has Celestia been updated to allow for the use of moving cloud shadow maps yet?

Any info here? Thanks, Bob

[selden]

Celestia v1.5.0 includes dynamic cloud shadows. It's an option in the Render menu.

However they are only drawn directly under the clouds and aren't cast toward the terminator: they don't get longer near the sunset and sunrise regions. Hopefully that feature will be re-implemented in a not-too-distant version of Celestia. (A previous attempt caused vertex shader routines to become too complex in some situations, generating error messages and red planets.)

[BobHegwood]

Celestia v1.5.0 includes dynamic cloud shadows. It's an option in the Render menu.

However they are only drawn directly under the clouds and aren't cast toward the terminator: they don't get longer near the sunset and sunrise regions. Hopefully that feature will be re-implemented in a not-too-distant version of Celestia. (A previous attempt caused vertex shader routines to become too complex in some situations, generating error messages and red planets.)

As ever, Selden, my thanks for your information. I have seen and tried to use the render option, but I didn't know if I had to do anything else. I didn't know if I needed to add a "ShadowMap" declaration to the SSC files, perhaps, so that was the reason for my question.

Much appreciated, again.

Thanks, Bob