Bow Waves for Planets

[MKruer]

Is there any way to script a bow wave in Celestia. I have a planet that is extremely close to the central star, enough so that it most likely would be able to produce a visible bow wave from the solar winds that would bounce off the planets magnetosphere.

I have tried to use the comet tag but this produces a tail that is so large that its goes over 100AU and it dose not show up when viewing the object close up.

Thanks

-Matt-

[selden]

I'd suggest a 3D model that orbits just in front of the planet.

[ajtribick]

When I made an HD 209458 atmosphere add-on (search the forum), I just created a small comet in the same orbit, and defined it to use the invisible mesh.

[MKruer]

Thanks

Now if I can only get it to look like this, I?€™m in business :lol:

[buggs_moran]

Damn, you almost had me going for a second, looked at the pic before the text....Thought I was going crazy.

[MKruer]

Does anyone have a clever way to create the bow wave. I tired to create a transparent planet, give it a negative oblateness and a precessions rate equal to the period around the star and then add an negative atmosphere depth but apparent you can?€™t make invisible planets.

[GlobeMaker]

Hello MKruer,

see
http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8545

You can make an atmosphere that has some transparent sections and
some opaque sections. You can spray on some partially transparent
areas. The atmosphere can be defined in the solarsys.ssc file to
appear at some distance above a planet. The cloudheight parameter
can set the bowshock wave thousands of miles above a planet.

GIMP is described in the link, and it shows Jupiter with an atmosphere
far above the planet. The link gives full instructions for making
any .png image have transparent areas.

[MKruer]

Yeah I saw that a while ago, and will probably implement it on all my planets. Anyhow I think I have come up with a viable solution to my problem. Here is the new and improved Vilox.



You can download and play with the textures here 2.1MB.

Also if anyone is willing to help me with making better textures I would appreciate it. Right now Vilox is using its original texture, however because I have changed the class of planet from Mercurian to somewhere between a Ferrinian (High Metal content) world and a Volcanic world, I need to update the textures. I still want the planet to be heavily cratered but I need to add the element of high volcanic activity. I add a night texture to illustrate that the planet is highly active, but I think I over did it.

Right now I am using 1k textures for easy distribution but I would rather up that to 2k or 4k textures and increase the quality.