New appearance of stars: static procedural texture and atmospheric scattering. You can see the effect of mutual illumination in close binary systems (heating of the side of the star facing the companion, sunrise/sunset on the sun). Up close, the texture looks quite descent (excluding solar spots),...
I added a feature to the engine: if real (catalog) planet has only height map defined (like Venus and Titan), then the color map is being procedurally generated from it. I need a reverse feature also - if there is only a color map defined...
Gas giants with 7 cloud layers. All layers are rotate around the planet, from afar it looks like gas flows are moving in opposite directions. The screenshots show a consistent dive to the very "surface".Theoretically, if one make the atmosphere thicker, so that the horizon...
Fimally we have a good Moon textures! Data release from LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), the device has a cool name LOLA (Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter). Before this there were silly small textures 2048x1024 for the entire Moon, or even fake ones. There are screenshots with...
New pre-release video. New engine features:Lighting effects: illumination of planets/moons by other planets/moons, solar eclipses, lens flare from the sun (actually old featrue). Attempt to animate Jupiter, if it works - I'll do the same for procedural gas giants (watch in HD). Solar system browser (2-dimensional). Procedural planets:...
Implemented a "browser" of a planetary system - a table of thumbnails of the system's planets and suns. Cells of the table are clickable: when you click on a cell, the object it describes is selected: you can go to it with G key and...
Just a bunch of screenshots of procedural planets with procedural textures (except clouds - Earth clouds are used; procedural clouds texture is not implemented yet)....
Working on procedural gas gaint textures. They are not animated yet. Actually animation is impossible with the current terrain engine, only as a moving layers approach (several transparent cluoud layers, moving relative to each other)....
Working on a more complex noises to generate more realistic terrain.Earth-like planet, noises: Fbm + distorted Fbm. Level of detail is up to 10 meters on surface. Detail textures are no applied yet.A moon, noises: FBm + Worley with crater function. The craters of successive...
I moved the procedural terrain generator to the GPU. The speedup is incredible 100-200 TIMES! Instead of generating elevation map and color map pixel-by-pixel on CPU, this work is now performed by special shaders. The first shader computes a mix of multi-octave noises (Perlin and...