Feb 01 2010

Procedural stars update

After a month of hard work, the procedural stars became more or less decent. Implementation details Hierarchical octal tree, 10 levels, nodes of level 0 contains the brightest stars, level 1 - weaker stars, ...

Dec 18 2009

Phobos and Deimos

Attempt to make 3D models for rogue-shaped moons of Mars. This is not really a 3D models, this is a regular SE "planet" with a regular cubemap texture and elevation map, but elevation amplitude is very big. The elevation map is 16-bit and defines a...

Oct 15 2009

Eclipse shadows

Implemented eclipse shadows. They are analytically calculated in the planet surface fragment shader. View from the eclipsed body: ...

Oct 06 2009

Mulitple light sources

Three suns illuminating Saturn (just for a test): Light source can be local. This one looks like a nuclear explosion near Saturn: Mulitple lights are needed not only binary and multople star systems, but for illumination of moons and planets by each others: This is the Moon illuminated...

Sep 30 2009

Detail texture for Saturn rings

Noise texture is sampled 4 times: 2 octaves of a normal 2D noise, 2 octaves of radially applied noise. This splits rings into millions of a narrow sub-rings. ...

Sep 23 2009

Saturn rings lighting

Front lighting: Contraversal lighting: This is based on a famous backlit Saturn photo from Cassini (this is a real photo): ...

Aug 23 2009

SpaceEngine dev blog

This is the first ever publication I ever made about SpaceEngine. It was originally published on the gamedev.ru forum. Original text was lost, only video remained. This was because I update the opening post multiple times during many years. Releases of first SE versoins were...