Slooooooowly (so slowly) figuring out how to do nebula like looking sort of stuff…
This looks pretty awesome so far. 
That’s absolutely beast. Procedural generation has always been something I’m a huge fan of, but I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around it. 
Like I can make a very basic virtually infinite terrain using a procedural mesh - but doing a deterministic approach which yields the same results all the time according to some seed is what I’ve never been able to figure out.
Hope you keep working on this, looks awesome! :rolleyes:
Yay! FINALLY figured out a way to fake proper translucency for the stars through nebulas.
Will try and make video tomorrow at work at lunch to explain.
Just wondering if you’ve ever heard of a program called “Galaxia” by Dexyfex?
He uses voxels to render the bodies, but he provides some theory about tessellation and nebula rendering on his webpage.
[video]A very quick trip around a small bit of the Galaxia universe - tech demo Oct 2016 - YouTube
PS. Every galaxy in this demo(which is less than one megabyte in size) has thousands of star systems, and each one has planets and moons. There are even asteroids and blackholes.
Hey there Dreyn74,
No I haven’t seen that one, how awesome is that?
If I can get all my stuff going that nicely (but also with foliage and oceans) I’ll pretty much be “mission successful”.
Thanks for the new motivational fuel
You guys are wizards.
Just testing 3d noise textures in a volume mat on a beam particle in the new volume fog…
Pretty happy with the results
And yah, it works volumetrically.
The sheets in the particle beam basically sample a 2d slice from a 3d noise texture, so as you move around the particle beam and the sheets rotate to be camera aligned, they redraw using an updated 2d slice from the 3d noise at their new angle.
That was billowed noise, this is normal noise:
Just have to implement this functionality here now and I can lay these out along the galactic arm splines:
(big thank you to Eric for figuring this out)
I think that’s because they understand that gamers are too impatient to fly for the amount of time it would actually take to navigate through a life size(ish) atmosphere
Remember the X games? Flying, flying, flying and more flying omg I’m still not there yet. One of the real challenges of gameplay design in a space game…
Also, my space fog material is coming along nicely:
And I’ve thought of a bunch more ways to trick it up too…
Was gonna try and do some fancy vertex painting stuff, but starting to think just manually mixing splines of different colors together might look perfectly fine…
Will add a curve though so you can control the tapering along the length of the spline.
And a youtube of me playing with colors and splines in it:
Are you still developing this? I am searching for a planetary system like yours and it would sadden me to see you give up
I still chip away on the weekends for an hour or two…
To be honest, at the moment I’m playing with the free voxel plugin that phyronnaz has made.
It’s super cool, but the real test or course will be how large it can go planet wise (am testing this more today).
Trying to port my galaxy stuff from 4.16 to 4.18 but have hit a brick wall with volume fog 
This is my space nebula particle beam thingy in 4.16:
And this is the exact same thing migrated to 4.18:
Fwiw, the mesh on the particle beam is still where it should be:
Help me obi wan kenobi…
Could it be something to do with the exponential fog’s density and height? I did hear they changed some things with how the fog was working. But I cold be speaking out the ■■■.
Also, Ive been silently watching your project for a while and you’ve some awesome stuff!
Hey Alonzo, nah tried all them… tried every hidden checkbox I could find in the material too (no joy yet).
Might have found another way to get it going though.
Just worried that I’m going to have to invent a new hacky way of getting it to do what I want every time a new version of the engine comes out : \
Thats pretty par or the course, and the reason I have a big sign telling my team to not update at all.
Unfortunately, I’d really like to try and make some money selling this… which means holding on a fixed version isn’t really an option : \
Okey doke, am pushing ahead without particle beams because adapt and survive, all that…
Currently vol fog on meshes only does the bounding box for the mesh, but I realised that I could still shape the fog inside the bounding box using shader math and local coordinates.
Here’s my first test of this:
You can sort of see the green fog filling the bounding box and the red/blue fog taking the shape of a cylinder.
Now here it is with a bunch of my noise mangling stuff bundled into it.
First up, from back a bit (will be daisy chaining cylinders like this along a spline):
And now some beauty shots flying through it:
And of course, all the colors and noise are hugely adjustable…
