Sure, this is the main reason to post! Thanks for taking the time to comment!!
Silverware wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:42 pm
, the snow is too thick/wide, and WAY too bright. Unless you are intending those blotches as city lights (in which case you want a soft yellow/orange instead, and for them to be far noisier)
Snow tipped mountain ranges are fairly small after all, compared to the rest of the map.
Yeah, the white dots are city lights, not snow. The snow is almost not visible, and mostly present on very few mountains and the ice caps, which are not well visible in this shot. I can try to "orangify" the light, but for some reason it has only a very limited effect.
Making them noisier (which indeed would look better) is a real challenge, as you have to see that it is already very noisy in order not to cover the whole planet but have individual cities... It is difficult to get the noisiness at such different scales. I'll think about it...
Silverware wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:42 pm
The only other issue I see with the planet itself, is that the cloud layer is using a noise layer at too high a scale. if each chunk of cloud was scaled down to 20% the size, it'd look better in my opinion..
The difficulty I have is that clouds normally have a structure and then small scale variation in it. I cannot bring this (in my limited competence) in a texture. If I reduce the scale, then while individual clouds look better, the absence of higher scale order becomes overwhelming:
So to make it work, I would need to find/use different fractals at different scales. Possible, but not trivial. Will have to think about it.
Silverware wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:42 pm
With atmospheric glow, getting this done is always a pain. I used to draw a circle of atmosphere color, cut out a circle the same size but offset to the right (to get the night side) and apply a blur, and draw that as something like a 5-15% opacity additive layer.
not perfect but it does provide a good enough effect for static images.
There are also libraries for doing it, if you are using 3D rendering. And I'd suggest using them in that case because the math is a pain to copy.
Thanks! This was my mistake, I forgot to make it additive. Now it's subtle, but it is here (screenshot above). I guess it should even be a bit bigger so that the clouds don't show as spikes (on the bottom, for example).
Silverware wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:42 pm
Other than these points, the ground textures are great, the space image is AWESOME, Although it's red on one side, and grey on the other. And I'd have it slightly rotated personally (rather than perfectly horizontal). And the little engineering stations (they are way too big to be ships in relation to that planet and orbit) are beautiful.
Thanks. The background image is however a camera background found on the inter-web
and just put because when using Vue's star field, the stars are big and look a bit like the city lights, which was destroying the effect.
The station are a bit closer than the planet, but still, the planet's model is 11km high, so a "realistic" ship of 300m or so is a bit out-of-scale