What became of this?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/What became of this?
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| Did anything ever come of Mustang's planet program? Check out this thread: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=54901#629575 It sounds like it was truly breathtaking, but the thread was eventually turned into a flamewar and was shut down. Did Mustang ever complete his program? |
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| I was wondering about that myself. |
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| Good question... any answers mustang? |
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| I hate it that it turned into a flamewar...I stopped posting to my own thread after I noticed it going strait to hell. I hope Mustang finished it, it was looking really stunning... |
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| I'd love to even see a pic of it. Mustang, you got a shot of it laying around? |
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| I loved simonh's comment of "but this should be straightforward stuff for anyone with a modicum of B3D experience." Yeah, right. _I_ have no idea what- "and invert the face normals. Texture it as a additive spherical map" -means. Please Mustang, forgive the flamers or not, but give the rest of us a code-snippet. We love you, honest. |
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| Invert face normals: FlipMesh Texture with additive spherical map: Add a second texture on a different layer, set textureblend to add and when loading the texture, make sure you use the spherical texture flag. |
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| Would anyone be interested in a sample i put together... I did it a while ago and it features: Normal Mapping Specular Highlighting of the Sea Moving Cloud Layer Moveable Sun Planetry Glow or Atmospheric Haze Planet Shadowing A quick screenshot is below:  I would be more than happy to put a zip file up of it if anyone is interested... The amount of code amounts to 110 lines which is about 1 and a half pages. Let me know guys... |
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| I'd love to even see a pic of it. Mustang, you got a shot of it laying around? Duh. Cross-posted... -> http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=63142 I have the shots, but don't have a (new) website yet. I can use my temp site though, I'll repost the shots using that tommorrow when I get to work where the files are. [edit] Oh, and ICECAP, that looks very nice! |
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| ICECAP, that looks amazing!! I'm interested in seeing how you did that :) Juan |
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| Looks good, ICECAP. I think your atmospheric haze thing could use a bit of fiddling, though. Right now it looks more like a glow effect. |
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| ICECAP that looks completely awesome! I'd be really interested if you posted the zip file you mentioned! |
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| Ironically, that planet has very little in the way of icecaps. :o) Looks VERY nice though. Not that Mustang's wasn't, of course... :o) |
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| Right o, here is the zip file... [edit] http://72.232.99.61/blitz/PlanetTest.zip Should work now... I cant keep it on my server for very long, but should be on there for a couple of weeks. |
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| ...And my old images + two new (horizontally tileable) nebulas. These are on my "backup temp" server so they won't be there forever. Two nebulas below are from the new version, I handpainted them originally using just photoshop. Original size for them was 1K*1K and they don't have stars because I have them on separate object - painting stars on BG would have meant that they are big and blurry and I didn't want that. Separating them from the background allowed me to use small tileable starmap - and just by adjusting the tiling settings I can control their size and sharpness easily.        Oh, and the sun, starfield and nebula gfx are now officially Public Domain... so if anyone here has any use for my maps go ahead and use them. I can even post the original 1K*1K nebula maps if someone wants those. |
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| Wow very nice stuff! Mustang, your Earth looks incredible. Ice, can't wait to download your stuff and check it out. Too bad I'm at work again, I really need to stop working...it just takes up too much time that I could spend coding haha. /pipe dream |
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| How about releasing some source Mustang? Come on, I started :D Share and sharealike. Hehe. If you need some space to host it, i can sort something out. |
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| nice...dont like the specular stuff..but the general lighting looks nice :] |
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| nice, those look like products of these tutorials: http://www.solarvoyager.com/tutorials.asp |
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| Your link opens up a Freeparking page. Perhaps another link for your file? Barney |
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| If you want to see something neat, open one of those images in photoshop (preferrably one with stars included), duplicate the layer, run a gaussian blur filter around 5.0, set the new layer to linear dodge and behold! bloom filtered space scene. |
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| I'll post my source but it may be a bit disappointing. |
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| Yes, ICECAP, your link opens up a page on FreeParking, unfortunately :( |
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| Yeah, sorry about that, its fixed. |
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| I just purchased the various versions of the earth maps above for $8. But now I'm wondering if I paid for the download or if I actually bought the maps and can use them in my game... I should have some new pics of my earth attemp later today and I'll post some source. Any thoughts on how to do a highly detailed starfield without it looking pixelated? A skybox might work... Also, what's the recommend maximum texture size you guys would use as a general rule? 2048x2048? I actually loaded a 10k map but I couldn't tell the difference really between that and the 4k map. I'm guessing there's a cut-off size for textures maybe. |
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| for $8. But now I'm wondering if I paid for the download That, mostly. You do know that NASA allows you to use NASA maps even commercially if you just credit them? Which is nice because NO ONE except them could have photos of earth, clouds and such stuff - afterall they are the only ones who can go there to take such photos :) how to do a highly detailed starfield without it looking pixelated? A skybox might work... I used that although it is more like 12-sided dice or something... 2048x2048? Yes. Blitz has DXTC support now but 2K is reasonable well supported even in bit older HW, 4K is pushing. I couldn't tell the difference really between that and the 4k map. I'm guessing there's a cut-off size for textures maybe. My guess is Mipmaps - you're only seeing lower mipmap level or something. But you're right, after some point the difference is minimal. |
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| I would say 2048x2048 is good enough for all but the most extreme use...some of the map textures in UT2004 are that big, but most are 1024x1024 (as are most of the items and character skins). |
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| The earth spins at approximately 0.00011574 revolutions per second. |
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| What kind of normal map must be used so that the bumps don't look like craters when the light is on the other side of the planet? ICECAP's normal map appears to work correctly. What type of normal map is this? Tangent space? Thanks Mike |
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| Tangent space? Blitz doesn't support TS so it can't be that. |
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| Thanks for that ICECAP. How did you make the normal map? |
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| Okay, I worked out my normal mapping problem. If you are making your normal map from a heightmap using GIMP with the normal map filter, check the WRAP and INVERT Y boxes before applying the filter. Presumably the same applies when using the Nvidia filter in Photoshop. Mustang how's you site coming? I need those beautiful tanks you made. Thanks Mike |
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| Journey back to Lave! Here's some more planet media. I added some nice twinkling city lights. Jump to Lave! |
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| Mustang: My city lights look a little dull due to the jpeg compression. What's the best image format for a nice sharp effect? As our resident artist, I know this is your area of expertise! |
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| Well of course uncompressed formats are better, I usually use .TGA. JPG's save ONLY download size, they use the same amount of VRAM than TGA when Blitz3D loads them in. So that's why I use only .TGAs (when I need umcompressed textures) and .DDSs now that Blitz3D finally supports them. Lights may look dull also because of mipmapping (bilinear filtering)... try disabling that if you need really sharp stuff. It may cause "twinkling" but wheter that is a problem or not is up to you to jugde. Stars for example may look even better with small twinkling... although the effect depends on camera movement somewhat. |
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| Mustang Your little bit of insite into this six months ago was too compelling for even a lazy ass like me. So I spent many hours scratching my head. This is what came of it.  It uses low res images (just trying to see if it worked) but has 2 cloud layers rotating at different speeds, specular water, night lights, Halo and an alpha z-order issue... (Go figure. Just wanted to let you know that your work inspired me. Gnu |
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| Chroma, You know when you said approximately? Could you be a bit more specific about that... (lol) IPete2. |
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| Haha! =p |
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| Thanks everyone for the insight. I did start putting a bit of a space sim together but when I came to making a planet, well, that's where I stopped complete coz it was pants. Q. Is it possible to create these `normal maps` that you speak of in Blitz? |
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| Normal maps are "evolved bump maps" - you can DL free plug-in from Nvidia for generating Normal Maps from grayscale bumpmaps in PhotoShop. Such normal maps are not the best of course because the source is not true geometry... and normal maps in Blitz have so many issues anyway that they are hardly usable. Planets look great even without them, and in reality it would take a pretty high mountains to show up as a bump from space... even himalaya doesn't do that :) |
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| Graythe: You can also try the normal map plug-in for GIMP, if you don't have Photoshop. Here are some possible steps for creating your planet media. 1. Produce a grayscale heightmap using difference clouds, plasma, brushes, or whatever. Black is low White is high. 2. Pick a sea-level a make all pixels at or below sea level the same shade as sea level. 3. Use a spherical correction filter to correct the image for mapping nicely to a sphere. I use a free one for Photoshop. 4. Make a normal map from what you have so far. 5. And or, you could use the lighting effects in Photoshop to make a regular bumpmap if you want some shadows on the terrain. 6. Decide on the terrain colors for everything above sea level and make a land color map. You could blend this with the bumpmap so its a little less flat. 7. Use your sea level pixels to create the black and white spec map. 8. Draw some clouds in another layer and apply some distortion filters to give them some rotation and coriolis effects. That's the short version. If there's interest, I could work up something a little more detailed. Of course, with some ingenuity, all of these could be produced procedurally in Blitz. Wouldn't that be cool! Mustang: Thanks for the reply. I'll try DDS and or TGA and post the results. I think you're right about normal maps for planets. They probably just add unecessary overhead, plus, it seems, you can't turn off ambient lighting with them to get the high contrast real-space look. |
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| Whoa whoa whoooooaaa! If this needs ingenuity as well then I'm outta here unless there's a big letters for small IQ's version. GnuImageManipulationProgram? I don't want to manipulate images of Gnu. After all that fuss over the donkey... Anyway... they look great. Step 1. A heightmap? I might be able to manage that. Maybe.... time passes... |
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| Well, given time, I could make up a little "Planet Pack" for everyone. |
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| That would be very welcome |
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| A 'Planet Pack'? It sounds fantastic. |
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| It's in the works! |
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| Eight planet texture sets can be downloaded from http://morbius.blitzforge.com. Check the downloads area. The textures are all DDS. Enjoy! |
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| I haven't got time to try them just now but I've got 'em. Thanks for putting them up. What's a `DDS`? |
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| DDS is a compressed texture format now supported by Blitz3D. They work quite well, compared to JPEG's and other compressed formats. |
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| More info about .DDS/DXTC/S3TC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3TC |
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| I guess it's time to take off sandals and get feet wet . I read the wiki - but what exactly is the benefit of using it - like can I speedily manipulate the image whilst it is compressed or something? or is it just a bit less lossy than me ole jpeg's? Anyway, I'm off to see some planets! Thanks for the insights. |
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| The main pro of DDS is, that the images are compressed within VRAM as well, unless JPG etc which have within VRAM all the same size as a BMP. this means with DDS you get the same pixel data amount as a png / jpg / bmp of 1/4 of the size (pixel amount) gets |
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| Thanks for the DDS info. Clever stuff. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.. evidently. Planet 001 of the pack resembles a very large bloodshot bogey on my screen, and I'm sure it's not supposed to so I guess I've still got a way to go before I can even use the 'planet pack'. So that I know where my backside should be, could you please post a picture of what planet 001 of the planet pack should look like? |
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| That looks a helluva lot better that wot I got here - thanks. I will keep on until it looks like that. Weird - Not sure about the green bits - pools of liquid cyanide? Exposed crystallline mantle? Algae? What do they represent? They are worth a page of anybody's story. |
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| Primordial ooze, perhaps? P.S. I can upload the code if it will help. |
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| That's a kind offer but I feel that I should do at least that much. |
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| I have a heightmap to normal map convertor in my sig if it's any use. |
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| Thanks! |
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