ROAM Planet rendering

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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DavlexDesign
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day palslet,
palaslet wrote:Is there any climate zones? or is this a "wet" planet? Would be cool to see some sand dunes in the desert and some ice mountains in the arctic sea.
A snapshot of an Early implementation of a  polar region.
A snapshot of an Early implementation of a polar region.
On the ground at the North Pole.
On the ground at the North Pole.
Here's a pic of an Early implementation of a polar cap (North Pole), The South Pole is in there too, playing with math that works on the Lat and Long of the planet, to calculate the different temperate zones, then I'll worry about land mass affections. It's all still very buggy, but it's a start.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Guys,

I've been toying around with the atmosphere shader, and I'm pretty happy with the current results, before, the atmosphere (if you look at some of the older shots) looked pretty lifeless, flat and generally quite booring, and, Sovaka (God bless him) has been giving me a hard time about it too, so I decided to tackle it again.
Now, we both looked at allot of shaders out there from various geniuses, and loved the look of allot of them, but I thought to myself, there has to be an easier way to accomplish this look, so as not to make it so expensive to render, my thinking being that the sky isn't that important in the scheme of things when it comes to gameplay, plus I'm going to need some more resources for my clouds setup, as they are integral in the dogfight scenario of game play in this thing.

Anyway enough gibberish, here's a couple of shots of the current atmosphere as it stands ....
Full daylight sun.
Full daylight sun.
Sun going down to sunset
Sun going down to sunset
Sun pretty much set
Sun pretty much set
If you look at these shots, you will see the detail of the Gas giant still, even in full sunlight, and the reflected light from the gas giant sort of effects the atmosphere scattering even at sunset. I know it's not physically spot on, but I think it gives the sky a life of its own, and it's very cheap to render.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day again,

Here's a couple more from higher altitudes ...
Pulling away to a higher altitude, keeping the sun at the horizon.
Pulling away to a higher altitude, keeping the sun at the horizon.
And now up at a higher altitude
And now up at a higher altitude
I sort of like the interaction of light at these angles, and it's getting close to something you would see in a photo, I know it's not exact, but I like it, and I think Sovaka likes it too.

I think it is an improvement, What do you guys reccon ?

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Love the first three shots, very emotive :)
Something about the last one doesn't feel right, but I'm not smart enough to know why...
Maybe the gas giant needs some sort of atmosopheric edge too?
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day UltraMedia,

I know what you mean by the last shot, but don't forget, that Gas giant is just using a simple texture at the moment, and it is 20 million kms away.
I suppose for aesthetics it will need something, and I do have plans for that as well, a sort of subsurface scattered thing.

Also, I have no anti aliasing going on yet either, so the jaggies sort of reduce the look as well, maybe that's what makes it look a little strange too.

EDIT: OH, I nearly forgot too, I don't have the new scattering from this new atmosphere on the terrain just yet either, hence the blackness of the terrain at high altitudes, maybe that will make it look nicer too. I'll have a go this evening, and see if I can re incorporate this new shader for the terrain scattering, then upload a few more pics.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

lol, 20 million k away...

Incidentaly, have you done tests with large meshes in your engine?

One of the things I've been battling with in various engines lately is epically large stuff.
In Heroengine, past a certain (moderately large) scale, architectural meshes simply disappear.
In Blender, my 1km long ship disintegrates at the far end at 1:1 scale (even with clipping maxed out).

Blender comes right if I scale my entire scene down 200%, and for heroengine, I'll need to break my buildings up into smaller chunks :(
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

G'day Ultramedia,

We haven't found any such issues yet.
If you like, we can test your mesh in our engine?

Just send us the mesh in standard Ogre exported format and email to;
gcampbell@aussiegenesis.com

Just as a FYI only; the largest mesh we are yet to test is a Space Station.
Phoenix docked at Space Station to show Scale.
Phoenix docked at Space Station to show Scale.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day UltraMedia,

I haven't had a problem with large meshes at all, that frigging gas giant is 20 million kms away and is 7 million km in "RADIUS", I know it's a rediculous size, but I just wanted to see if Ogre could handle it, and it does without a hitch, even with a transparent atmosphere around it. But with the transparent atmosphere at 7000km deep I do get some z fighting when the near clip is reset when close to the terrain, but if I enable the logarithmic depth buffer hack, I have no zfighting.

As for ships and things, I scaled the Phoenix up so that it was sitting on the terrain, and was twice as tall as the atmosphere is thick on the planet, and it worked fine too. The Phoenix was approximately 100 km long I think, and had no real problems flying around it and looking at it close up.

What I found with 3D apps, is that you work in 1:1000 scale in it, and then export it out like that too, then scale it in engine, to bring it all together in your engine, for larger meshes that is. So to handle that, maybe have a config file with a scale option in it, to tell your engine what it has to do to get it to the right scale for in engine game play.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Sounds like you're using that logarithmic scaling thing that planet rendering people talk about, though I didn't know from past things I'd read whether it worked on all meshes or just the terrain system. It's pretty exciting to hear you talking about planet sized ships too, not that you'd have a whole lot of that in a game but it's pretty epic that your system is that scalable.

Of course, the downside of all this is that it makes all the game engines I'm testing seem *quite* claustrophobic ;)

Sovaka, I'd love to see my ship in your engine I just feel a bit silly sending it at the moment as I haven't done any texturing on it *blush*
Now that I've got my (semi) procedural character system going though, I'm going to redirect my creative energies back to ships so I'll see what I can do this week.

P.S. Speaking of which I've got some samples of my character system here at blenderartists:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... characters

It's blender based and rigged and ready for animation (I've even trialled it with kinect mocap - results are so so). I don't know anything about the blender > ogre pipleine, but if it looks like something you'd be interested in I'd more than happy to give you a no strings copy due to the awesomeness of your project :)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day UltraMedia,

Thanks for the nice comments mate, much appreciated.
The "semi procedural character generator for blender sounds cool, and going by some of those shots on your blog, they look nice too. Shame it's only for blender, but hay, I suppose Blender uses Lua (I think) for its base scripting language, so it's not impossible to get that thing in an engine I suppose, food for thought there.

As for the scalable nature of this thing, I have designed it to cater for a complete galaxy, not just a solar system, so I had to build in some major vertex position and precision hacks, dealing in light years and AUs, not just floats or doubles, even doubles can't handle those distances, doubles are fine for solar systems, but going out to 100s or even 100s of 1000s of light years, that's a different matter. I'm using 2 doubles to represent one axis range, so 6 doubles makes up a positional vector for a celestial body. At the local axis of a planetary body, I still need doubles in the cpu data, and then only at the last point in the chain when it all goes to the GPU, does it get converted back to floats, this way I can have very large planets that allow me to reach the surface to within 5mm, and still have perfectly smooth and steady placements. You can stand with your nose up against a tree trunk and rotate slowly, and there is no precision jittering problems (That took me a little while to work out and get working properly).

EDIT: Here's just a couple of shots showing the ground scale stuff I was talking about (remember how far that Gas Giant is away from the camera).
Looking up to the sky with my chin almost against the tree trunk.
Looking up to the sky with my chin almost against the tree trunk.
And now with my cheek nearly touching the trunk of the same tree.
And now with my cheek nearly touching the trunk of the same tree.
EDIT2: I was just looking at my code again and realized that the images above are not using the logarithmic depth buffer hack. Before I found out about that hack, I worked for a long time to get the best precision I could with just modifying the near and far clipping planes on the fly, using the standard Ogre commands in the setview() routine I have, that actually sets up all the parameters each frame for the planet to render itself.
So you can see, that you really don't need that hack to get reasonable results.

Ships, now that will be something I'm really looking forward to seeing. Can't wait mate.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by zootlewurdle »

Very intruiged to know exactly how you're handling the scale. I'm trying to model a simple, single star system and very rapidly run into issues of scale.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

DavlexDesign wrote:going out to 100s or even 100s of 1000s of light years, that's a different matter. I'm using 2 doubles to represent one axis range, so 6 doubles makes up a positional vector for a celestial body
O_o
Ho. Lee. Crap. Batman. *sigh* I have seen the future, and it makes me sad for me but happy for you :)
DavlexDesign wrote:Shame it's only for blender
Fear not mighty planet god, my character system deliberately uses only completely portable game engine friendly components ;)
It's just a standard textured rigged base mesh *except* I use shape morphs to switch between a generic male and female shape.
The character customization is just a front face photo mixed into the generic male or female texture and another shape key for the face shape.
All of this can be exported as a conventional animated character. I'll have a muck around with the existing blender > ogre tools and see what I can come up with.

Anyways, tonight I'm going to do me some ship building...
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by LordBaal »

ultramedia wrote:Of course, the downside of all this is that it makes all the game engines I'm testing seem *quite* claustrophobic ;)
Naturally, no other engine would give you an entire universe on the palm of your hand....
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Jabberwocky »

The shots from the planet surface (both tree-trunk and the horizon shots) are looking phenominal.
On the high altitude screenies, I don't like how the planet is totally black - even if technically correct I'd prefer to see something. Maybe the scattering you mention will solve that.
It's a pleasure to watch your guys work on this. Thanks for the updates.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Jabberwocky,

Thanks for the great feedback, I love constructive criticism, and you are right, technically it would be black on the far side of the planet, unless there where cities and stuff on there of course, but aesthetically I think I will have to incorporate some sort of ambient scattered lighting. I will try it out tonight maybe, depends on the family, and how much piece and quiet they give me.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

Here you go Jabberwocky ....
Dark Side of the planet
Dark Side of the planet
Does that look nicer ?

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by LordBaal »

I think it does look better. Sort of remind me of a briefing image on starcraft.

By the way, out of sheer curiosity, do you have a name (or nickname) for this planet? I mean, after working on it as the test ground all this time?
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

LordBaal wrote: By the way, out of sheer curiosity, do you have a name (or nickname) for this planet? I mean, after working on it as the test ground all this time?
Actually we don't O_O
Maybe we should call it Baal?
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Guys,

Seeing that LordBaal is the first to ask, I think, like with Astronomy he gets to name it ...

Planet Baal sounds good to me :D

Lord knows we are gonna have a gazillion to name later on ...

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Jabberwocky »

DavlexDesign wrote:Does that look nicer ?
Way better! :)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Guys,

I've done a little more on the ambiance of the dark side of the planet, I wanted to keep the color, instead of going grey scale, because when on the ground, it didn't look right, no detail or anything.
Ambiance from the back of the planet
Ambiance from the back of the planet
Side on so you can see the lit and unlit sides as well as the transition.
Side on so you can see the lit and unlit sides as well as the transition.
And here is the look when close to or on the ground in the dead of night.
And here is the look when close to or on the ground in the dead of night.
I think that starlight should play a part in the night look of the terrain, I've still yet to make the reflection from the Gas Giant effect the darkness, but then I'll get to that later.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

Here you go LordBaal,
A nice screen Backdrop at 1920x1080 of the current planet (NAMED !!! ).
A nice screen Backdrop at 1920x1080 of the current planet (NAMED !!! ).
This one is for you and anybody else that likes it, it really does make a nice desktop wallpaper.

EDIT: For any of you that have got the pic before the SPELLING MISTAKE :oops: was fixed, this is a new fixed image.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by LordBaal »

Thanks a lot mr. Alex!!! It's quite a sight! And it's an honor to have it named after me. :D
DavlexDesign wrote:it really does make a nice desktop wallpaper.
You could bet on it. It's sitting on mine right now!
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day LordBaal,

You're welcome mate, Soon your little baby will be coming to life with all sorts of goodies.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by UT2007 »

Will it be open source (GPL or some license) or simply closed source ? :?:
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