Allow CloudLayers textures to be completely opaque so Gas Giants can be modded in

It's pretty much all in the title.

The only thing standing in the way of making a gas giant with an atmosphere beneath it and a rocky core is the fact that CloudLayers always render like an atmosphere no matter what kind of texture is applied to them, so you can always see through them and they disappear in shadow (even if you layer them up really thick).

If we could choose whether the CloudLayer should be rendered as a normal texture or an atmosphere, this would allow us to create all sorts of wonderful Gas Giants

-Ed

 

have you tried stacking more than one?

This combined with a cubeblock modeled as a lower gas layer placed in the center of the planet should be good enough i think

 

It also may have to do with fog settings. I'm trying to figure out how to get the fog to reach the cloud layer. I also wonder if increasing the mie scattering will help. I'm waiting for the modding guide at the moment. I've been frustrated in most of my atmospheric experiments so far - especially trying to create Jovian worlds. I hope the guide is thorough. I upped the fog intensity and it looked promising, but it hugged the ground.

 

Talbone: Stacking more than one does obviously make the layer more opaque, but it also gives an unpleasant bright specular effect. In any case, it still blends to nothing on the dark side of the planet - revealing that it is in fact a small rocky world. I've tried literally everything when exporting the CloudSphere model, to using textures without any alpha whatsoever, but it seems to be built into the way they render to not allow them as regular opaque objects. There's no entry for the CloudLayer in TransparentMaterials - if there was (like there is for pretty much everything else) I could just the settings - including alpha - from there. Sure you could use a cubeblock as you say, but then you have to deal with it clipping at a certain distance, which completely ruins the whole thing! Unless there's a way to override view distance and have it always render no matter what. It feels like it's so close... argh!

entspeak: Try increasing the RayleightHeightSpace. That will extend the atmosphere upwards. Or just plain increase the scale - though you'll see that doing so starts to result in really psychedelic effects when moving towards/away from the planet.

 

Yes we absolutely need a switch for this. Perhaps some tag in the cloud layer definition. Because tell me that this planet wouldn't look way better with an opaque cloud layer:

 

And it's the one thing that would allow us to quickly and easily create much MUCH bigger planets - because you can just expand the cloudlayer it to be huge and fill it with atmosphere! It's such a tiny amendment that would make such a huge difference. Pleeease Keen

The planet in that shot looks lovely - I'm assuming it's a regular solid planet with "gas-like" textures as the terrain? I thought about doing that.. but a 120km gas giant is just .. not big enough!

-Ed

 

Can you say how you got the atmosphere textures to work even that well? Mine look completely transparent and or flipped (you can see them from the ground, but not from space.) Also, you might try increasing fog intensity and mie scattering. That will mask the land further. Looks pretty good so far!

 

I'll try that. I know that mie scattering is more related to fog smog, so I hadn't been working much with the Rayleigh. I increased the fog intensity and that coated the planet really well - even on the dark side, but the height of the fog was the problem.

 

There should be a way to achieve that. Though i dont know if it worked for me because i had a perfectly black sphere.

As seen here i made a black hole and the "atmosphere" is perfectly solid and black.


The textures i used are 32x32 black RGB/HSV (0,0,0) and 255er alpha.

Edit:
Alright i checked it again and altered the texture itself.
The texture didnt make it through so the game reads the texture wrongly and interprets it as invalid texture. At least that is what i suspect.
So even the same texture with white spripes on it displays as perfectly black sphere.

I really need to use another graphics tool than Paint.net as that apparently cant store the textures in a way the game will read. Same happens to my height maps which are all invalud and thus flat.

Sorry for the wrong hope.

 

This was my first attempt at custom clouds. It was originally an export from Space Engine that I changed a bit using Gimp. I just created the texture exactly as you see there for the colormap and used a solid white alpha map. I replaced all six existing far cloud layers with my texture and set their rotations all to 0 so they'd line up. It doesn't look so good from the ground, but really that surface wasn't made for this anyway so that does not surprise me (I just took an Earthlike planet that I was working on and used it for this).

 

Well, I'm still having the same issue I had before. My clouds look great from the surface, but can't bee seen from above. Maybe it's the relative difference. But, I think I'm getting somewhere with thickening up the atmosphere. We'll see how it goes.

 

Edit: entspeak - where did you get that gorgeous skybox?!

If your clouds can't be seen from above you need to flip the relative fade in/out values around - otherwise they'll fade out when you move away from the planet.

Just as a quick update, I spent the weekend grappling with source code, unsuccessfully compiling the current broken build, and poking around with shaders. The end result of all that is that I've managed to find a way (though it's a rather nasty hacking of compiled assemblies) way of opening up options for bigger planets.

So I've now set to work on crafting something that looks like a gas giant with custom textures and cloud layers and suchlike. It's definitely coming along - I'll post a screenshot later when I'm home from work.

I'm basically barely using atmosphere at all now, except to add a glow. I have instead created voxel textures for the smooth surface (which will be solid but indestructilble), because after looking through the shaders I don't think the atmosphere (as it currently stands) will ever be able achieve the right look of a solid gassy surface - particularly on the dark side.

-Ed

 

Which skybox? I'll try what you suggest. Have they updated the source?! I'd be interested in figuring out how fog works. If that can be intensified and made to meet the cloud layers, it would be about having extreme relative distances for the clouds. I wish they would simply have atmosphere radius as a generator figure rather than having it only in the save. For the life of me, I can't figure out how I made the fog opaque the one time I did. It was a fluke and I can't get it to do it again. That's the real key, I think to making gas giants. Normal planet size with huge atmosphere and fog that can fill the void between.

 

The one in your screenshot further up the thread. Looks to have a milky-way-esque skybox that looks rather nice.

This is where I've got to with mine..



I'm pretty pleased with it tbh. Now I just need to add some rings and make it enormous. I might lighten it up a bit too actually because it's quite dark when viewed from an atmosphere.

And no.. the source still hasn't been updated

 

Oh, that's DaveC9000's skybox. I was quoting him. I just downloaded DotPeek. I've got some questions about gases that the devs haven't responded to that I think I'll just look up myself at this point. Also, would be good to Lon at how the fog settings work and how to set atmospheric distance. The fact that one can create a black hole (blocking the starlight) gives me hope that you can possibly fill that hole with color.

 

My skybox is also a Space Engine export (sort of...Space Engine just exports the textures it can't make cubemap dds files). Space Engine is a very exportable program. I have a whole bunch of those, and the strange thing is they work as local mods but if I try to put them on the workshop other people only see white sky. I've never been able to reproduce the problem locally so I can't fix it. Just been hoarding all these skyboxes.

 

Are you able to throw them up in a zip somewhere to download? Much appreciated if so.

I've heard murmerings from others about Space Engine - I need to take a look at that..

That is, after I go home and make the Gas Giant in the picture 500km in diameter

-Ed

 

My 2 cents

 

Okay check this out! On a whim I tried this today and it works real well. This cloud system consists of:

3 Layers - regular alpha mask and an all white cm
3 Layers - same alpha mask with an all black cm. same exact rotation as white layers, with Relative Altitude set to 0.1
HillParams Max is set to 0.06 for this map (Did this to tone down my heightmap, but it also pulls the entire cloud layer a bit closer to the surface)

The end result was surprisingly good. There's a shadow under the clouds and at certain angles it creates a subtle embossing effect. It even seems to somehow maintain the cloud opacity a little more than usual. Check it out:



@vorneus I'll see what I can do with those skyboxes. Maybe I'll try to get them working on the workshop as it's been a while since I tried that.

 

DuneD: Not sure what the first one is (other than a image now permanently imprinted on my retina..!) but the Jupiter model looks really nice. Such a shame we can't get away from the opacity problem (for now at least) - which is why I abandoned that approach for one that uses a solid surface.

DaveC: Thanks mate. It would be appreciated if you could literally just zip up the local mod and slap it on WeTransfer before grappling with the workshop, which seems to have issues at the moment.

You're right that the dark layer and white layer does seem to help the opacity. I notice it's still subject to exactly the same shift to transparency at the edges though - and I imagine on the dark side too? Seems pretty much unavoidable with how the shader on it works at the moment. Have you got some kind of different earth textures on that? Looks to be more sea, and a more turquoise colour sea?

 

What settings did you use in the first shot? I had that - but orange... I was hoping to recreate that and find a way to dim it down. I think I have that same Jupiter texture. I've been going to Celestia and NASA for mine. That's where my Venus clouds come from.

 

That's one of a few terrains that I painted by hand in L3DT. It can do 2048x2048 tiles, but it can't do the kind of texture wrapping required for a cube map (specifically the complex up and down textures), but I sort of cheated by making oceans that spanned the seams between the faces. It also has a rather useful 'attribute map' feature that works quite well for generating mat and add files. I'm still working on the random ore distribution though. Might have to do that in a separate app. I've been on the lookout for a new terrain editor, but nothing has jumped out at me yet.

Oh and the skybox from those screenshots: SolSky Skybox (zip)

 

Thanks a bunch for the skybox. Man I wish the compression was nicer..! Would make such a difference to Space Engies if they introduced high-res skyboxes.

Man, great job if you hand painted that terrain! Pretty sure I wouldn't have the patience for that..

.. he says, after 3 hours tweaking a new planet

-Ed

 

I found this program... G.Projector from NASA that helps convert varying forms of maps. I'm hoping to use it when I want to convert some cylindrical planet texture maps into cube maps. I haven't really had a chance to use it yet.

 

Hi =), Dune can you pls make an tutorial how you make a sky texture like your Saturn, i dont get a texture on my sky^^

 

From his youtube comments we know that Marek thought the results of our currently limited ability to make gas giants were cool so with this change we could do so much more.

@Drui It might be a bit cheeky to ask, but what is the likelihood this being implemented given that it would greatly benefit modders?

 

+1 this because adding gas giants adds environments, and environments add game play.

 

+1 Yes please!

 

I mentioned this in @Xocliw 's stream the other night [02:34:57] and there were some encouraging words between him and the other youtubers online. Obviously it is in no way a guarantee/promise but I'm hoping the Devs will at least be made aware of this.