Idea Planetary ring effects

[Mr Martian]

i have always thought that the ring textures in orbiter do not quite "behave" right, and for those who have played Celestia, they will know that the rings in celestia do two things that the rings in orbiter do not:

1- the rings cast shadows on the planet

2- the rings have a far more realistic light effect. they act more like a reflective surface than a solid surface. this is hard to describe, but people who have played Celestia will know what i mean

in celestia, as you pan around the planet, the rings all but disappear when we see them from behind, but the rings are very bright when we see them front on, this is how actual rings would behave since they are made up of many individual particles. if there is a way to make an ad on that gives rings this effect, or makes them cast shadows (or both) or if someone could tell me a way to write a code that does this, it would be really cool!!!

 

[Quick_Nick]

This probably has to be done in a non-default graphics client. And with transparent bands in the rings.

 

[Mr Martian]

This probably has to be done in a non-default graphics client. And with transparent bands in the rings.

is there any way to do that??

 

[Kyle]

That would require extensive coding. I think though, if you're really serious about it - you could delete the rings, create a mesh + texture for them and make sure they're the exact same proportions of the real ring, you could get a shadow on the surface of Saturn. Run it in D3D9 for a realistic shadow as well.

 

[SiberianTiger]

for those who have played Celestia

Is there a way to "play" Celestia? I always thought it was a sort of a fancy 3d-catalogue for various celestial bodies.

 

[Quick_Nick]

is there any way to do that??

Short of making your own graphics client, I would make the request in an existing thread for one of the existing in-development clients if it isn't already implemented. I think the 'shininess' you mention may be taken care of by High Dynamic Range Rendering though, which is at least planned if not implemented for some clients.

 

[Glider]

i have always thought that the ring textures in orbiter do not quite "behave" right, and for those who have played Celestia, they will know that the rings in celestia do two things that the rings in orbiter do not:

1- the rings cast shadows on the planet

2- the rings have a far more realistic light effect. they act more like a reflective surface than a solid surface. this is hard to describe, but people who have played Celestia will know what i mean

in celestia, as you pan around the planet, the rings all but disappear when we see them from behind, but the rings are very bright when we see them front on, this is how actual rings would behave since they are made up of many individual particles. if there is a way to make an ad on that gives rings this effect, or makes them cast shadows (or both) or if someone could tell me a way to write a code that does this, it would be really cool!!!

The only way to make rings with these effects is to add code for that in one of existing graphics clients (or write your own client :lol. I don't know about DX7 but all this can be relatively easily done in DX9 and, of course, DX11 by changing shaders that renders rings and terrain tiles. In the case of DX11 client it will require probably only 150-300 lines of shader and c++ code so there's no need to create your own graphics client.

 

[Major Malfunction]

I suggested this back when Orbiter 2010 came out -

Could Saturn be modified so that the shadow the planet casts on the rings and the shadow the rings cast on the planet are visible?

All hail the Probe!