Question Questions regarding custom planets and asteroids

[GalaxyWanderer]

Hello, I have been making planets and asteroids with custom terrain(meshes) in a sculpting program, and I have two questions:

Are there any limits to how BIG an object can be in orbiter? I will be making these as objects and it wouldn't do of my planets were limited to 5km due to some stupid size limit.

In addition, these asteroids and planets are incredibly detailed on a macroscopic scale. Grath, for example, is a supermassive and structurally deficient planet, owing to a high speed asteroid impact that nearly broke the planet apart and resulted in a complete remelting of its nearly-frozen core. The entire planet is covered in rifts and ridges, with a huge impact crater on one side and a massive uplifted bulge on the opposite side. Many volcanoes have formed in the uplifted regions and the crater, and around the rifts and ridges. The entire planet has been resurfaced and is now highly unbalanced due to the shifting of mass away from the center of rotation, which causes great tidal forces to act on the planet's interior(Grath used to be tidally locked to it's primary before the impact). These tidal forces have caused a runaway reaction, as the forces heat up the mantle, causing volcanoes in the bulge to erupt and pile up even MORE materials in the bulge region, making the tidal forces even worse. Eventually, Grath will slowly tear itself apart midway between the crater and the bulge and form two new planets.
Since these planets are so detailed, they come up at around 50,000-200,000 triangles, on average(with some outliers). Will I have to do some special stuff to get these to work?

Anyone who could answer these for me would be a great help!

 

[jedidia]

Are there any limits to how BIG an object can be in orbiter? I will be making these as objects and it wouldn't do of my planets were limited to 5km due to some stupid size limit.

There is no hard limit, but Orbiter is known to produce some weird results with very large objects. However, the death star works well enough, so I guess your average asteroid should be fine.
Note however that you will NOT be able to land on them, nor to orbit them. Vessels in Orbiter are neither sources of gravity nor do they have collision detection.

A common trick is to actually have a small planet at the center, and then place the terrain on it as a landed Vessel. Still no landing on the terrain, but at least you have gravity...

they come up at around 50,000-200,000 triangles, on average(with some outliers).

I guess I can savely assume that only one of them will be visible at a time. In this case, this should work on any decent GPU. Might be trouble on older machines, but otherwise 200'000 faces should be managable, as long as you don't have much additional load in the scene.

 

[asbjos]

...Note however that you will NOT be able to land on them, nor to orbit them. Vessels in Orbiter are neither sources of gravity nor do they have collision detection.

A common trick is to actually have a small planet at the center, and then place the terrain on it as a landed Vessel. Still no landing on the terrain, but at least you have gravity...

This is not necessary.
In the object's configuration file, under the "Visualization Parameters", set MaxPatchResolution to zero. This will make Orbiter use the mesh with the same name as the planet/moon/asteroid located in the "Meshes" folder.

Phobos is an example. From the Phobos.cfg:

; === Visualisation Parameters ===
AlbedoRGB = 0.37 0.36 0.39
MaxPatchResolution = 0           ; use explicit mesh

 

[GalaxyWanderer]

Ok then, I might as well give you all some previews of Grath and an unnamed asteroid(name suggestions welcome).

GRATH SIDE VIEW:

GRATH UPLIFT REGION:

GRATH IMPACT BASIN:

SMALL ASTEROID SIDE 1:

SMALL ASTEROID SIDE 2: (same 'roid!)


Please note that Grath's surface is uncratered due to volcanic resurfacing, and that the ONLY crater that is an impact crater is the impact basin. All other Grath craters are volcanic calderas.
Even the impact basin is slowly disappearing, courtesy to the central rebound mountain-turned volcano.
In addition, I am also working on a really cool celestial oddity: a black dwarf(a cooled down white dwarf, for the confused people out there) that is lightly glowing and can be landed on. It is really neat in concept, but I am trying to figure out what kind of terrain a white/black dwarf would have. So far I am modelling it after what we know of neutron stars, so it is very dense and has a very smooth and spherical surface split into plates by narrow but deep cracks.

 

[jedidia]

In the object's configuration file, under the "Visualization Parameters", set MaxPatchResolution to zero. This will make Orbiter use the mesh with the same name as the planet/moon/asteroid located in the "Meshes" folder.

Nifty. I didn't know that.