PlutonianEmpire's Worlds

Wait, what, there's Terragen 3 now?
Been a while since I played with that kind of thing, so I'm not too surprised that I missed it.

Yeah, 'fraid so. All versions of 2 seem to be no longer available.

All is not lost. T3 isn't bad, either. The set up is different, and I'm not sure how much I like those differences. So, as a result, I've just spent more time w. it's predecessor. I've yet to receive any messages saying "this trial has expired" from it. I understand not wanting something that is going to expire on you, though.

Maybe it exists somewhere...

-M-

At some point, the trinary system at the bottom of the last page lost its appeal to me; so I harvested the textures, and since I'm going to use the fancier-looking surface textures used by the second planet as a generic, one-size-fits-all texture for "higher-profile" habitables in my Celestia (similar to the generic textures package a Celestian created for his globular cluster generator), I ported it over to my newest project; with intention to be replaced later by a texture of my own.

My latest project, is a fictitious, transiting Kepler system, which will be the focus of a new short story I've got brewing in my head; which takes place a number of decades from now, and will be a bit of a commentary on the state of our society and civilization and where I'm fully convinced we're doomed to head for.

In the story, we find a system in Kepler data that has numerous transiting Jovians and Super-Jovians in the inner system, and a fairly active host star, and no Earth-sized exo-moons; and find out only decades later (during the 2050's) that the system hosts an "Earth 2.0", after having previously never found one, in plain sight; a trojan in a Super-Jovian's trailing L5 point; during humanity's final months as a modern, technologically-advanced civilization, after which we return to the Medieval Age for a few centuries before ultimately succumbing to Earth's final, biological demise (the point of no-return was in the 2040's.)

The system is a thousand light years away; and I named the world after a very apt metaphor, for which the short story will be named.



The blue tint of Needle's moon is a coincidence; the color was generated randomly. New meaning to "once in a blue moon" now, doesn't it? :lol:The moon is named Haystack, respectively. I'll get around to making moons for the Jovians eventually.

I hope you like the sci-fi reference in the second pic.

@ Sunchaser: As for clouds, I generally take an image from the xplanet clouds site, apply my desired transparency settings depending on how much cloud cover I want, in Paint shop Pro 9, save it, then load it up in Gimp, add guides to all 4 edges, stretch the canvas by 3 times horizontally (so a 2048x1024 image becomes 6144x1024), with the image centered in the middle, copypasta the 2048x1024 layer twice (for a grand total of 3 layers), move the third copy to the far right (the guides should help make it easy ), add a drop shadow with "offset x"=1 (or -1 if you so choose), "offset y"=0 and "blur radius"=2, and an opacity around 70 or so, crop the cloudmap back to the center, 2048x1024, and that's it.

The 3x width method is because going without it leaves a nasty vertical crease, where the left and right edges are in the cloud map image, in the dropshadow from the north pole to the south pole when viewing the finished planet in Celestia.

you forgot this last step...bake at 350 for 1 hr, serves 12.


-M-

I found this gem in my imgur account while uploading new pics for this post.



Mind you, this was before the introduction of the Mie atmosphere rendering to Celestia. And even today, planets still don't cast shadows on other planets, only moons.  


Now, imagine if the migration scenario in the early Sol system had a different outcome....



Life probably would have been a wee bit different if Earth was a Jovian moon.


Anyways, during an especially hot and humid day in summer of 2011, MN was literally more humid than the Amazon, with the dew points in some locations at a whopping 87­­° F, and it seemed to redden our sunsets, so I took this picture, and then superimposed a Celestia screenshhot of Delta Trianguli, and did tried some fancy painting to try to get a naked eye representation of it...

Habitable exomoon. Originally generated by someone's improved version of Stargen, and then I added the rest (Mie atmospheres, textures, etc) to make it look nicer.



A view from above the south pole of my earthlike circumbinary at Delta Trianguli.



With two  moons as well, this world is a heckuva lot more exciting than Earth (sorry Earth. But you're just plain boring. )



This might make for a good crater scene in Terragen, on the inner moon.



A view of the same moon. You can see the surface scars from the formation years of Delta Tri, and a comet in the background.



A view from the outer moon.



Experimenting with the cloud texture layer I used to use for this world.

I really don't know how I missed any of this...Very nice space shots!

-M-

Look, ma! The 2012 Mayan Apocalypse that never happened!

Because I'm an impatient son of a gun.

I present to thee...



KIC 9632895(AB)b!

And a fictitious Earth-sized exomoon. Not necessarily habitable...



A smaller moon, with a continuously replenished, but toxic, atmosphere thanks to being a tidal Mars. Note the distant, fictious companion planet on the upper right corner, another gas planet with moons.



You didn't think I'd leave out the "usual two suns" shot, did ya?

An update to my earlier showcase, depicting the formation of Delta Trianguli. I replaced the flat, ugly accretion disk with the three sprites models also generated by the author of the other sprites models, that I found hiding away in my downloads folders.



I also have it hosted on my dropbox, for those who want to take a gander.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qor2vhbq0t3zxzg/8tri_frm.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rkseqmce56dofg5/history.ssc?dl=0

(The individual ssc file is newer than the one in the zip )

Wow! Those look amazing PE! All of the shots.

I'm anticipating your next entry

All right. Given my username, it was only a matter of time.



And my favorite science fiction version:



Naturally, suspension of disbelief can only go so far. In my defense, I'll just say we'll use a global network of short-range gravity generators, enabling small worlds to get warm, thick air without having any of its satellites come spiraling down.

Of course, world greenhouse spheres would work as well, so I could just add a "second" cloud layer to act as a thin, faintly visible sphere of transparent material to hold it in, but I'm not sure how to deal with the polar pinch if I added a grid (Aka, supports/infrastructure) to the texture.

Anyways, on a different note, sometimes my dreams can be a source of inspiration for unique situations...



Here, in a dream involving my planet at 8 Tri several years ago, I was looking for it fruitlessly, until I found it in a HZ asteroid belt of a Hollywood-style asteroid density.

Fast forward to last week, The same planet was apparently, forcibly relocated by someone. Guess where it ended up?



As seen from my location, with a naked-eye FOV, I believe (click on the thumbnail for the full size )





And from a third dream, I apparently had eyes with a precision unknown to mankind, and during an exo-planet hunt, I saw a jovian transit its star, and noticed it had multiple earth-sized exomoons, and an extremely recent and still very dynamic ring of molten material, due to a completely destructive collision between two of it's moons. I uploaded my best representation of it to youtube.

https://youtu.be/bNLGvnfBxkY

All right. Now for something a wee bit different...



I am now using Space Engine!

Here's the same scene with "Earth" atmosphere.



Yes this is my world at Del Tri.

I'll post more, but first I got some heavy exploring to do...

Do send a postcard!

-M-

PS: How do you find SE over Celestia?

Sunchaser wrote:

Do send a postcard!

-M-

PS: How do you find SE over Celestia?

Shirley Surely you can't be serious?! That be like, the most loaded question ever!

Lol, pros and cons, that's for sure. Learning to add my own custom worlds is a bigger thorn in the side than it was learning to add them in Celestia, that's for sure. And I do dislike the fact that I can't alter atmosphere colors in SE (the atmosphere used in my last post was the premade atmosphere model for Neptune, and it made my world look ugly from space, so I had to take a few liberties to make it look right), not to mention using the cylindrical maps that Celestia likes causes issues in SE, and cubemapping seems more intimidating and difficult than it was learning to VT for Celestia. I only just got SE last week, but so far it seems all right.

And in addition to my custom 8 Tri import, I made a custom import of a galaxy I made for Celestia, and I just last night started exploring it, and I found this little gem:



An desert exomoon with organic, multicell life, its own set of rings (very faint, but still visible), and a jovian with a very fresh set of rings, likely from a geologically recent collision.

I haven't tried it yet; I do like how SE looks when you are planetside, though...the sun(s) look more realistic.

Interesting to know it prefers cube maps to cylindrical, (just when I've been getting good at them, too..)

Does it generate worlds all on its own?

-M-

PS: And don't call me Shirley.

Yes it does generate worlds on its own, I do believe.

Select literally any galaxy in the Universe, you will find SE-generated star systems, complete with planets (including surface features to explore), moons, and asteroids and comets.

Of course, the drawbacks is system requirements and the lack of ease of making custom systems. It does have its own in-game system and world editor, but in my experience, its buggy.

More worlds:

Ice cold alien world, with exotic alien vegetation. It's cold enough that even with an earthlike surface pressure and gravity, you can actually see the atmosphere collecting in the valleys and basins, so to speak.


Entrances to ice caverns on this world, perhaps?


A frozen alien titan with Venusian surface pressure and alien vegetation. I suspect those ridges are Europa-like tectonic boundaries.


Sunset on an Early Earth-type of planet.


The view from its moon.

The screenshots remind me a bit of Terragen!

-M-

Exactly! Or, to put it another way, it looks like a merger of Terragen with Celestia!

Gravitational lensing; this is one of SE's quirkier systems, the WD is just over a solar mass while the secondary is a main sequence star just under a solar mass. The HUD identifies this system as having an age of over 700 million years. Interestingly, it also has six worlds harboring single cell life (massive panspermia), including 3 jovians with "floaters".

Perhaps this system somehow got a second chance at life?

I made an imgur album of some of the worlds I've explored in Space Engine, and some of which I created myself. Hope you enjoy.

https://imgur.com/a/0W9jM

102 90 ~200 Images, so too big for one post.

Very neat! Admittedly, some of the landscapes look a little too artificial, but overall, Space Engine looks like it delivers quite a lot!

-M-

You're right. Then again, it's still a Public Beta.

Good artwork. The "Phoenix" among the stars is really suggestive.