Screen Shots for next version

[streb2001]

I made some tiles for Jiuquan and surrounding area from the ESDI Landsat images. Not sure what the res is but you are welcome to use them. You can find them in China Manned Space Program by Majortom and me (or I can email them to you). The higher res local base tiles are from G***** E**th and there is a copyright logo on one of them!

s2k1

 

[markl316]

Hello Dr. Schweiger. I was just wondering 2 things.
1. Will there be more than level 8 clouds? In pictures from the space shuttle, very fine detail is discernable in the coulds, which is not possible with level 8.
2. I've noticed that in pictures from orbit, the ocean appears more of a turquois, while in orbiter it is more of a deep blue. Does this have to do with the atmosphere in real life?

And I am DEFINITELY looking forward to this release. :woohoo: Thanks a million.

 

[willy88]

Idea for next version: variable light levels

One thing that's iffed me a bit (although it probably hasn't iffed anyone else) is that the light level stays consistent throughout the solar system. For example, it is just as bright on Triton as it is on Mercury. I may be wrong, but wouldn't it be darker on Triton than Mercury in real life? It's probably impossible with the graphics engine Orbiter currently has, but perhaps with OVP it may be possible.

 

[tblaxland]

One thing that's iffed me a bit (although it probably hasn't iffed anyone else) is that the light level stays consistent throughout the solar system. For example, it is just as bright on Triton as it is on Mercury. I may be wrong, but wouldn't it be darker on Triton than Mercury in real life? It's probably impossible with the graphics engine Orbiter currently has, but perhaps with OVP it may be possible.

Yes it is darker on Triton than on Mercury. Whether you perceive it as darker is another question. For example, my office is some 30 times dimmer than outside, yet I don't perceive it as any darker because my eye doesn't see both at the same time. You can't show the real luminance difference between Triton and Mercury on a monitor because of its limited dynamic range and even if you could, your eye would dynamically adjust to reduce the perceived difference between the two anyway.

 

[martins]

One thing that's iffed me a bit (although it probably hasn't iffed anyone else) is that the light level stays consistent throughout the solar system. For example, it is just as bright on Triton as it is on Mercury. I may be wrong, but wouldn't it be darker on Triton than Mercury in real life? It's probably impossible with the graphics engine Orbiter currently has, but perhaps with OVP it may be possible.

Well, let's see. If you want to go for the physically (rather than physiologically) correct relative light levels, then Triton is about 60 times farther from the sun than Mercury. With the inverse square law, that gives a radiation density of 1/3600 that of Mercury. If we give Mercury a maximal RGB intensity of (255,255,255) then that would leave a (rounded) intensity on Triton of RGB (0,0,0). Rendering a black screen is well within the capabilities of the current graphics engine, so it could be done.

 

[doggie015]

Well, let's see. If you want to go for the physically (rather than physiologically) correct relative light levels, then Triton is about 60 times farther from the sun than Mercury. With the inverse square law, that gives a radiation density of 1/3600 that of Mercury. If we give Mercury a maximal RGB intensity of (255,255,255) then that would leave a (rounded) intensity on Triton of RGB (0,0,0). Rendering a black screen is well within the capabilities of the current graphics engine, so it could be done.

maybe another feature would be vessel headlights?

 

[tblaxland]

maybe another feature would be vessel headlights?

Well, multiple light sources is a feature that many have been looking for. Perhaps we will get this with OVP one day.

 

[agentgonzo]

Before people get too excited I should mention that the extremely high-resolution levels are not intended for global coverage just yet. The amount of texture data would be just a bit too unmanagable. My current development version has global level-11 coverage derived from the 500m Blue Marble textures. Only Florida is covered to level-14.

Will it be possible for users to download the L14 data from the blue marble and add those sections in themselves? Eg, for people with custom bases or who want to fly over their own house in high resolution?

 

[Woo482]

Can i have a link to the blue mable page?

 

[agentgonzo]

Can i have a link to the blue mable page?

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

 

[martins]

Will it be possible for users to download the L14 data from the blue marble and add those sections in themselves? Eg, for people with custom bases or who want to fly over their own house in high resolution?

It is possible to add new highres areas into existing texture files with the "merge" function of the pltex utility shipping with orbiter. The process is slightly tedious (and removing textures is not currently possible, so keep a backup), but it should work ok. pltex for the next version will be "L14-aware".

 

[martins]

Hello Dr. Schweiger. I was just wondering 2 things.
1. Will there be more than level 8 clouds? In pictures from the space shuttle, very fine detail is discernable in the coulds, which is not possible with level 8.
2. I've noticed that in pictures from orbit, the ocean appears more of a turquois, while in orbiter it is more of a deep blue. Does this have to do with the atmosphere in real life?

And I am DEFINITELY looking forward to this release. :woohoo: Thanks a million.

1. I am considering this, but it needs a bit of work. L1-8 are implemented very differently from L9 and above, so the cloud engine would have to be substantially upgraded. Also, cloud textures require alpha support, and the texture files are 4x larger than surface textures. A global cloud layer at L14 would probably set you back a few TB in size ...

2. This could probably be changed by processing the source images for the surface textures. If someone can come up with more realistic textures, I would be happy to include them. It may not be possible to make the water and land textures look realistic at all altitudes with the current render engine, but maybe new graphics clients can rectify this.

 

[Woo482]

will any Orbiter 2006 p1 Mods work whith the new orbiter ?

 

[Urwumpe]

What about using procedural clouds? I know that such a system works very good and fast for rendering forests and other vegetation in flight simulations, it should also work for clouds. You just need enough triangle textures for a planet to create a random look. I have seen a paper describing how to do this, don't know if I can find it again.

 

[Woo482]

the clouds from the nebo addon [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2782"]OrbiterClouds(aka Nebo)_0.3[/ame]
Look Good

 

[Artlav]

Good to hear there is progress once more!

Speaking of surface bases: Are there any good free highres surface textures for other launch or landing sites I could use? For example White Sands, Kourou, Baikonur, etc. Anything around 50m/pixel would be good.

I-Cubed LandSat could be a good option, as far as i understood their license, it's in public domain.
Woomera, Baikonur and White Sands looks clean in it, but Kourou needs clouds removed.
The imagery is filtered to singled color level, which feels close to the Lv11 blue marble, most looks like that: [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3293"]Woomera Hi-Res tiles[/ame]

 

[simonpro]

2. This could probably be changed by processing the source images for the surface textures. If someone can come up with more realistic textures, I would be happy to include them. It may not be possible to make the water and land textures look realistic at all altitudes with the current render engine, but maybe new graphics clients can rectify this.

The orbiter ocean color matches the majority of the images we get from meteosat.
This leads me to think that either the color is correct, or that the orbiter sea textures were processed from something using not entirely visible bands.
Do you know if the orbiter textures were created from something that used IR-R-B instead of R-G-B? This would explain the color shift, if it exists.

 

[martins]

The orbiter ocean color matches the majority of the images we get from meteosat.
This leads me to think that either the color is correct, or that the orbiter sea textures were processed from something using not entirely visible bands.
Do you know if the orbiter textures were created from something that used IR-R-B instead of R-G-B? This would explain the color shift, if it exists.

The orbiter textures were processed by a rather sophisticated mechanism, namely me tweaking the colour balance until it looked about right :lol:.

 

[martins]

What about using procedural clouds? I know that such a system works very good and fast for rendering forests and other vegetation in flight simulations, it should also work for clouds. You just need enough triangle textures for a planet to create a random look. I have seen a paper describing how to do this, don't know if I can find it again.

I don't know. I guess that procedural clouds may work ok if you are considering only a small area (for example when rendering the sky from a single viewpoint on the surface), but orbiter needs global coverage. Making the cloud cover look convincing from a high orbit must be a non-trivial task. It probably requires at least a rudimentary global climate model. This would be a cool thing, but maybe beyond the scope of orbiter.

 

[Cairan]

It probably requires at least a rudimentary global climate model. This would be a cool thing, but maybe beyond the scope of orbiter.

On this subject, will the next version include functions to set a local atmospheric parameter for vessels? The only thing I have to say is missing in Orbiter is that the wind is always zero. It would open the door for many atmospheric improvements by 3rd party enthusiasts (such as myself :hotcool: ) if we could set the local pressure, temperature and density returned to a ship's call to functions involving these parameters by overriding what is fed by the global planetary model. By doing so, it would then become possible to have a module generate zonal temperature and pressure gradients, on a very rough scale at first, so that the temperature is not always 15 C everywhere on Earth everyday of the year.

Something along the line of:
vessel->setAtm(temperature, pressure, density);
vessel->setWind(vectors...);

Then, the weather modules would be responsible for checking on the vessel's positions (lat, long, alt), lookup/generate the proper values and set them with the functions in my example above. If someone wants to attempt fancy stuff such as getting the data from the Internet in real time, or generate clouds around vessels based on water vapor content from a model or real data, it's up to the weather module code to deal with it, from -outside- Orbiter's core.

Just my 2 cents