Star images

Here are some quick examples of the HDR starfield (The exposure goes much further than these examples show)

Dark:

Medium:

Bright:

The one thing that I really should fix is making the cloud maps tillable.

That's it for now :)

Star generator version 3, part 2

Version 3 of the star generator is more or less done, and producing good results. Naturally whenever a project like this is done I find myself looking back and planning how things can be improved. The whole layering system for example. Right now everything is defined within a text file and read from top to bottom. While this works well for stars and basic nebula blending, it doesn't behave quite like I would like it to.

One of the main reasons why I'm still not completely happy is that any subsequent layer affects the previous one, especially with blending clouds. I may attempt to write a new feature that includes actual layers which then get composited together though a final command, ultimately making it one step closer to a world-machine style star generator.

For now I think I'll leave it as is, and focus my attention elsewhere. Sure there are a few things that I would like to fix, like the whole sphere to texture coordinate mapping, and maybe star bursts for brighter stars. I'll probably save those for version 4.

Next up on my plate I'm learning about ray tracing, but not in the traditional sense, AKA rendering. More like finding object A from object B, while bouncing off walls. Think billiards, but not a game :) I won't say too much right now because I would really like to get some proof of concepts going (Maybe in C# since I'll be able to draw things much easier than in c++).

And maybe, just maybe, if I'm feeling really saucy, I'll try playing around with the Doom 3 source code and implement this new idea. On a quick side note, it's funny how the Doom3 source code is much more readable than the original Doom code. Maybe it's the whole C++ / OOP they did.

That's it for now!