Very nice work. I feel the atmospherical light bounce is way too strong on bodies that don't have atmospheres.
Also the lighting could have better default, with the sun intensity cranked up and the shadow side almost pitch black, as well as the universe darker (if we assume being blinded by the sun reflection.
I've done a few of these in my time, I've never had such as nice detail on the surfaces, it's very well done.
I would suggest also a default where the orbiting camera would in fact move (in all axises), at the moment it's pegged to the sun and perfectly aligned to the equator, which is not as realistic as the rendering quality!
Of course that would involve the programmer to have to render the sun too, as it would come in and out of the background.
The angle of the lighting is also odd, from the upper right at a higher latitude than the sun would be for Earth (or Mars, for that matter). It's a bit strange to have the same artificial lighting for Venus without an atmosphere, too.
The sun intensity makes the planet look weirdly blurry to me. Is that how it normally is? Is that how it's supposed to be? Dropping the sun intensity to 0 made it look more crisp, which is the way I like it.
Wondering too. It does look like it though. It has that noisyness / fuzziness that makes it sometimes a bit too random compared to earth continents. I found that it works best for earth like map simulations (with water basically) when combined with some terrain physics (moving plaques of random sizes and other geological elements) to generate the high level details, and Perlin on top for the natural noisiness. For other planets though it does great.
Perlin noise (with octaves) can generate quite natural looking terrain height maps. But it doesn't simulate natural processes such as wind and water erosion and plate techtonics. For example, plate techtonics tends to create mountains ranges in lines (such as the Himalayas and the Atlantic mid-ocean ridge) rather than completely randomly. So I guess that is going to limit just how natural it can look, especially over the scales that these natural processes operate.
I've done something similar in my Zero Gravity game (long time iOS project), where I had astronauts engaged in rag roll kung fu in space, with a GLSL earth in the background with day/night cycles. Just like Star Wars has sound in space, my game (as well as the linked renderer) added ambiant light to see the unlit part of earth. However, there is no ambiant light on the dark side of the moon<-<-<- earth.
I also work on this in my spare time, and this example is pretty great! I’m still always stuck at cubespheres and not being able to create content on the surface.
(You’d be amazed at how complex it is to create planets, and how ungrateful a lot of us are to be confined to just one!)
guess I really need a new cellphone! this is amazing, I just expected that my cellphone will become hotter and slower, and then confused about why my cellphone still work.
I am guessing the clouds are noise projected on a spherical surface, rotating separately from the planet. It would probably be quite complex to add coriolis force, and also slow things down.
Generally very nice, but for me the planetary texture looks doubled, everything is a bit blurry and it seems as if the texture is there twice, a bit offset against each other.
Edge Win10 64.
Try reducing the sun intensity to 0. That's what worked for me as I noted in a comment above:
> The sun intensity makes the planet look weirdly blurry to me. Is that how it normally is? Is that how it's supposed to be? Dropping the sun intensity to 0 made it look more crisp, which is the way I like it.
Mars's atmosphere has nothing to do with its color. It's red because the dirt/rocks are red. The atmosphere is so thin that, except when it kicks up dust, it has little to no effect on the planet appearance (in visible light).
Also the lighting could have better default, with the sun intensity cranked up and the shadow side almost pitch black, as well as the universe darker (if we assume being blinded by the sun reflection.
I've done a few of these in my time, I've never had such as nice detail on the surfaces, it's very well done.
I would suggest also a default where the orbiting camera would in fact move (in all axises), at the moment it's pegged to the sun and perfectly aligned to the equator, which is not as realistic as the rendering quality!
Of course that would involve the programmer to have to render the sun too, as it would come in and out of the background.