Problem Chariklo Rings

[gertz]

No impacts on framerate please...

Also, what about to make a SINGLE mesh for body and rings?

 

[Piper]

...Also, what about to make a SINGLE mesh for body and rings?

That's exactly what I am doing. To clarify, when I say model the rings seperately, I mean as seperate objects in the same mesh file.

 

[gertz]

Be sure to center them well... I think, keeping the rotation axis of the body as a normal to ring plane will end up as nearly vanilla looking ring.
Let's see what happens.

 

[4throck]

Simply put a plane there and texture it (but remember it must be double sided).
Modeling circular shapes for this only adds unneeded detail.
So yes, do it all using a single mesh. you can even rotate the rings using animations, as long as the plane is on a separate mesh group.

 

[Piper]

Simply put a plane there and texture it (but remember it must be double sided).
Modeling circular shapes for this only adds unneeded detail.
So yes, do it all using a single mesh. you can even rotate the rings using animations, as long as the plane is on a separate mesh group.

Mapping a texture onto a simple plane doesn't work in this case, because Orbiter will not render transparencies for planetary bodies.

Either way, I have a working model now, with the rings modeled with Chariklo itself. I have to say, it doesn't look half bad, it actually came out a lot better then I thought it would. Right now I'm just working on a custom surface texture for Chariklo (as opposed to reusing a texture from a previous add-on I've made), and I still need to tweek the physical properties themselves.

As for rotation, I luckily get to cheat a bit with this. There isn't any data on the actual rotation rate of Chariklo (they've tried to measure it before, but have to date been unsuccessful), but based on the shape of Chariklo (ellipsoidal), I think it is likely that it has a fairly high rotation rate, so I'm just going to set the rotation rate of Chariklo fast enough that it would match the orbital period of the main ring.

One thing I'm debating on whether or not I should do, is putting in a fictional shepherd moon. It is highly likely, that there is at least one shephard moon orbiting Chariklo, but none has been discovered yet, and it is likely to be small enough that it won't be discovered any time soon. The paper on the discovery of the rings even contains equations for calculating possible shepherd moon properties. It is of course possible that there's no shepherd moon, and that the rings are just very young, but the face there's a distinct gap in them, and the rings are well defined as opposed to diffused, leads me to think that there almost certainly is a shepherd moon in the system.

 

[Castor]

Will the moon be having a low inclination with respect to Chariklo ?

 

[Piper]

Will the moon be having a low inclination with respect to Chariklo ?

Yes. Being a shepherd moon, it's inclination will be virtually 0.

 

[4throck]

Mapping a texture onto a simple plane doesn't work in this case, because Orbiter will not render transparencies for planetary bodies.

Didn't know about that. Mesh flags?

Orbiter renders transparency for any spacecraft mesh. Just make the rings a spacecraft, land it on the asteroid and that's it.
Having the moon is nice!

 

[Piper]

Didn't know about that. Mesh flags?

Ya, I tried that earlier as well, and it didn't work either. I don't know why, but Orbiter doesn't seem to want to handle transparencies at all for planets/moons, regardless of it being in the mesh or the texture file. I'm really hoping that that will be something that will be changed in future versions of Orbiter.

Orbiter renders transparency for any spacecraft mesh. Just make the rings a spacecraft, land it on the asteroid and that's it.
Having the moon is nice!

I thought about doing it that way. It wouldn't be hard, and it would look mostly right, but there's a couple of downsides to doing it that way. Everytime the point that the "spacecraft" is on the ground goes behind the planet, the whole rings would be rendered in shadow. It would also mean that users would have to enter the rings into every single scenario that they want to involve Chariklo in, and I'm loath to have users do that. But as I said before, I've physically modeled each ring, and even without the transparency working it still looks really nice. I was actually having a lot of fun last night flying a Chapman probe out to Chariklo, and also just flying around Chariklo and between the rings. Not to boast too much about my own work, but I think you guys are going to really like this one.

I have decided that I am going to do a moon for it, and I'm going to work on it tonight. I figure that if users do not like having a semi-fictional moon there, they can just get rid of it. That's the last part that needs to be finished, so once that's done I can upload the add-on to Orbit Hangar. In which case, I guess that means it's going to be released tuesday .

 

[4throck]

Interesting info about the shadows, didn't think about that.

Just for the sake of discussion, I'd implement the entire system simply as vessels and use docking ports for landing sites. Trust me, it works well in low gravity, no problems with zero altitude, etc, etc.

Sure, copy/paste in scenarios is a pain, but that's an Orbiter limitation.

Anyway, good that you got it to work the proper way :thumbup: