Orbiter Screenshot Thread

[Yurik]

Finally on orbit!

 

[martins]

Recreation of a famous picture with new cloud textures and a few atmospheric rendering tweaks I'm currently playing with:

 

[thepenguin]

What is that?

Looks like a Blimp.....

That's no Blimp, it's a space station!

And no, that wasn't just for the star wars reference, it is actually a monster-sized space station. (Though I now notice the resemblance to a blimp)

50 metre radius at the center, 400 metres long.

EDIT: By the way, martins, awesome photo!

 

[orb]

You can only tell it's rendered when you notice 16 segments in the top-left quadrant. :lol:

 

[Ripley]

Recreation of a famous picture with new cloud textures and a few atmospheric rendering tweaks I'm currently playing with...

I opened it full screen and I wondered why it didn't rotate while dragging it with the mouse...

 

[martins]

You can only tell it's rendered when you notice 16 segments in the top-left quadrant. :lol:

Ah yes, good point. Maybe I'll have to revisit my HorizonManager class. Doesn't make much sense to be stingy on the number of horizon segments when the surfaces are now rendered to insane resolutions :thumbup:

Although there is _a lot_ of other stuff broken at the moment in more urgent need of repair after all the latest feature expansions, so this may be pushed back a bit ...

 

[martins]

Another little tweak, this time to the cloud rendering: I'm oversaturating the cloud diffuse intensity, to avoid them turning brown and feeble towards morning and evening, and make them overall look more substantial.

 

[orb]

Additionally to the clouds, I like the higher specularity and lower diffusion on that picture, too. :thumbup:

 

[Matias Saibene]

 

[Koloss]

The cake is a lie... or to say it in GLaDOS' words:

Look at you soaring through the air majestically...like an eagle. Piloting a blimp.

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

Another little tweak, this time to the cloud rendering: I'm oversaturating the cloud diffuse intensity, to avoid them turning brown and feeble towards morning and evening, and make them overall look more substantial.

I usually tend to be rather blind towards subtle graphics things, but that is really nice to see. The Earth is finally a blue marble, not aquamarine!

 

[Weirdo Earthtorch]

Another little tweak, this time to the cloud rendering: I'm oversaturating the cloud diffuse intensity, to avoid them turning brown and feeble towards morning and evening, and make them overall look more substantial.

Looks very nice. Does the tweaking with cloud rendering include a fix for cloud seams sometimes visible in LEO?

Thanks! W.E.

 

[Spacethingy]

High Altitude Atmospheric Flight Test Incident

An autopilot software bug (i.e. my antivirus started and froze Orbiter for several seconds :lol causes a sudden and extreme g-excess on beginning a descent to Vandenberg AFB, badly damaging the port-side wing of an XR2 Ravenstar class vehicle. The port aileron is completely ripped away. RCS bursts are needed to augment the surviving control surfaces.

A little differential thrust is needed on the final descent to the runway, alongside some tweaking with the ship's variable centre of mass system.

After a surprisingly soft landing (4 m/s vertical speed), rollout is completed safely.

The Shuttle Carrier 747 is called to retrieve the ravaged spaceplane and bring it back to Edwards AFB for complete repair.

Arrival at Edwards AFB. While skilled engineers work on the physical damage, software engineers will be working flat out to kill the offending bug in the autopilot code. Later reports recommended the upgrading of the system's RAM chips, although a secondary cause was mentioned to be the YouTube videos playing in the background.

Addons:

[ame="http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3887"]XR2 Ravenstar 1.0[/ame]
[ame="http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=6007"]Orbiter stock bases upgrade[/ame]
Shuttle Fleet Aircraft

 

[sorindafabico]

Titan, sweet Titan.

 

[LunaM]

Earth from Moon by Apollo

 

[spacman]

MIR SPACE STATION

QUICK LOOK AT MIR

 

[Matias Saibene]

WARNING: large images (about 4MB each)

ENB Series is (in my opinion) one of the best additions to improve the visual aspect of Orbiter. Solarliner has done a great job:thumbup:.

 

[orb]

WARNING: large images (about 4MB each)

According to their properties, they are 200-900 KB and only 1024x575px (but although their extensions are .jpg, they are PNG files). :shrug:

 

[Matias Saibene]

According to their properties, they are 200-900 KB and only 1024x575px (but although their extensions are .jpg, they are PNG files). :shrug:

:huh:

This case reminds me of when Windows Vista told me that the System32 folder weighed more than 0 bytes:facepalm:.

 

[martins]

Does the tweaking with cloud rendering include a fix for cloud seams sometimes visible in LEO?

If you are talking about the seams between individual tiles, they will be reduced simply due to the fact that cloud textures now support higher resolution (they now use the same LOD quadtree mechanism as the surface textures), so any tile edge artefacts will be pushed to higher spatial frequencies.

However, there are also visible seams present in the source cloud map (from the Blue Marble/Visible Earth project). This is simply due to the fact that the cloud maps were acquired over several days, so individual areas are taken at different times, and don't always fit. The highest resolution maps also don't have polar coverage, which I needed to substitute from the lower-resolution versions.

I tried to manually edit the most obvious seams, but there probably also are some left.

Note that sometimes things that look like seams are simply the effect of underlying surface formations (mountain ranges, coast lines). Since in Orbiter the cloud animation consists of simply rotating the entire cloud layer, the clouds usually don't match with the topology below, so they can sometimes look odd (sharp cutoff edge in the middle of the ocean, etc.)