Oolite Bulletins

BPlanets is an oxp attempt to bring in planet maps that make use of new features of composite maps available in Oolite 1.89 (development).

Here are some details.
0. Name -- I named it BPlanets for two main reasons: first, the maps are generated with Blender, and second, Povray Planets are the "A" package as they are a source of inspiration for this, and the target for final coverage.
1. For the adventurous and courageous I can provide the Blender file used to generate these (it might need some sanitizing, as it's in a "personal ordered mess" status at this time ).
2. The initial package has only Earth like variants. As mentioned above, I used Povray Planets as a source of inspiration, and tried to cover this initial type of planet. As a reference, I classified the G1 Povray Planets in 5 main types: Terran (119), Barren (115), Water (7), Winter (5), and Gas Giants (10).
This package has 4 different types of colour palettes for the planets.
3. Technical aspects:
- all the maps are cube maps 1024x6144 (yup, they are 6k, alright)
- the procedural maps are generated in Blender (2.8x - 2.83 at this time)
- the actual generation is done by "baking" - which is a sort of rendering, not "on" a camera view, but on a texture
- there are 4 baking steps, one for diffuse, one for specular, one for normal map, and one for city lights
- the actual process is scripted in Python (Blender's scripting engine), because the parameters are "changed by animation", and although you can render an animation, there is no such option for baking
- the main inconvenience is that baking is only available for the Cycles engine (which can be used through GPU and/or CPU). The times it took for each of the steps was roughly 6 minutes per diffuse map, 6 minutes per normal map, 2 seconds per specular map, and 2 minutes per lights map (for the curious this happened on an NVidia GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER -- the newer OptiX facility doesn't do any good, as it doesn't support baking).
- the post-processing (for combining diffuse/city lights and normal/specular) was done using ImageMagick suite. The city lights and specular maps need to be inverted before inserted in the alpha channel of the diffuse and respectively normal map.

Suggestions, complaints, or any other comments are welcome.

The planets look great, well done and thank you

Hello.

Gave this a quick try and I like it, well done .

I think it makes sense that most of the worlds are earthlike (given the prevalence of earthlike inhabitants).
One thing that I think is missing however (and I mention it because I believe you have the ability to churn out textures relatively quickly) is wind.

What do I mean? Well, if you look at large scale cloud patterns over the earth you can see the effects of winds causing them to spiral and stretch out. Wind is largely driven by temperature differences, so given a rotating, ellipsoid body (i.e. planet) with an atmosphere heated by a star, it would seem reasonable to expect wind, and occasionally lots of it.

As is, the clouds look quite good just suspiciously globular. I criticise because I like what you've done and see potential for it to be even better.
In any case, thanks for the hard work.

Redspear wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2020 12:03 pm

[...] the clouds look quite good just suspiciously globular. [...]

I'm with you on this one.
Although I've tried to diversify the cloud layout (smaller clouds together with the regular white blotches), without the deformation given by the planet rotation they just seem to be planted there, no dynamics.
I have some ideas about how to deal with this, one of them being "brute force" which would definitely work, but would double the time spent on each final texture (baking diffuse and cloud separately, and combining them after). This would also complicate the specular map creation. I consider this the last resort, while investigating other option(s) that would allow the deformation to be generated inside the shader.

Commander_X wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:33 pm

I have some ideas about how to deal with this...

I sort of cheated in Additional Planets and used real world cloud layers. I think there were 6 (or was it 8?) different layers that I used but I didn't fully exploit their potential.

Suppose that I only had one cloud map, all clouds would look exactly the same unless I flipped it. I can flip horizontally or vertically but not both (would just look like I had turned it around and with no 'up' in space...) to give me 3 possibilities from one map. 8 x 3 = 24, already a significant improvement but someway off a desirable number.

Suppose further that from each map I removed approx 66% of the cloud features to use in 2 other new cloud maps (thereby tripling the number of now incomplete cloud maps). Perhaps divided into polar temperate and tropical cloud formations (with overlap where necessary) and then recombined to create entirely new maps. even just from just 8 originals that could be 8x8x8 = 512 unique cloud formations. If 'flipping' were introduced at the initial stage then 24x24x24 = 13,824 (or 18x18x18 = 5832) unique cloud layers.

Quite a bit of work initially (dividing the 8 into 3 parts) but after that fairly straightforward stuff.

I appreciate this may not suit your approach but it's a trick I missed when drawing from very realistic but limited resource material. If I ever redo those textures...

Redspear wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2020 6:18 pm

I sort of cheated in Additional Planets and used real world cloud layers.[...]

I'm somehow familiar with the technique, and if I remember correctly a similar approach was taken with some of the Povray Planets.
But, behold (!), Blender 2.83 brings a nice new feature to the noise texture, called "Roughness", and the quality of the planetary clouds can be generated from a single noise instance quite nicely:


Of course, following our previous comments, there is a 60 degrees shift at the Equator to suggest some atmospheric activity. How do you find these "winds"?

If you want to see it as your own Lave, here are the textures that can be unzipped over their counterparts in the OXP above.

Commander_X wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2020 3:35 am

How do you find these "winds"?

Big step in the right direction.
Nice work

Ok, half a month later, after replacing my old 750W power supply with a new 850W due to ... eh, should I call it breaking (long story short, tried to add my other GTX 970 to contribute to Blender's CUDA efficiency, but 1. the old 750W said "I give up, this is nuts!"; 2. the new 850W "moved" them well, but it also turned that without a liquid cooling feature for the GPUs, they won't cooperate too well. The RTX 2070 was heading to +85C at 10% of the baking of one image).
I've actually managed to reduce the render times per set of textures, to a bit over 1 minute for each of the diffuse, normal, and lights, and 3 seconds for spec/roughness. The size of the resulting images doubled (the archive is 2 G this time). This seems to be something that will be needed to deal with, as this is not half of one galaxy, and it is "out of control".

To add to the initial specs:
- as with the initial set of maps, all the planets have ice caps (forgot to mention this there)
- the clouds have a swirl pattern around the planet, with a maximum effect at the equator

The new version (0.4) of the OXP is here.
Some appetizers (for each of the main 4 colour palettes):

My girl Onrira with rings


Neighboring Erlaza ...


... on the way to our best friend Ensoreus


And finally Ra, the closest with the fourth palette

The new cloud effects look great The city lights shimmer at distance from the planet, not sure if that is intended or due to my old graphics card/monitor, but the effect is quite good.

Awesome!

Worth every byte!

dybal wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 4:53 pm

Awesome!

Worth every byte!

Thank you!

DGill wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:56 am

The new cloud effects look great The city lights shimmer at distance from the planet, not sure if that is intended or due to my old graphics card/monitor, but the effect is quite good.

That is an artifact of the moving emission map (planet rotation) and the pixel sized lights (it is also visible on the F7 screen). You can see this even when close enough (e.g. just outside the station), on the far side of the planet (due to the thinning effect of the spherical wrapping of the texture).
It can be attenuated by lowering the colour assigned to them in the shader, e.g. in the Shaders/oolite-default-planet.fragment file: can be changed to something darker, i.e.:

Due to (not so) popular demand ( ) a 700M (512x3072 pixels) version of the 119 maps in G1 are available here.
From a decent/regular distance you'd usually approach a planet (>=station distance), they should provide an almost similar experience.

WIP report -- gas giants:



A quick attempt to reproduce the palette of Oreseren/G1 in PovRay Planets.

I've been silently enjoying BPlanets here for a while now, so firstly thanks very much for sharing these textures. The gas giant looks nice, but as constructive criticism, I think the banding may be a bit too thick, and the alternation of thick bands and thin bands seems a bit unnatural.

Thank you, too!
Searching for opinions was the reason I decided to show the WIP. The input is very much appreciated.