In this article, we’ll go through basic usage of the new Celestial Vault Plugin, with a focus on creating custom Stars Catalogs
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/9XyB/unreal-engine-creating-custom-constellations-for-the-celestial-vault-plugin
This is golden for me, except for one thing. I want to set it up for the sky on the moon.
To do that accurately has wrinkles. It isn’t just that you need to skin the moon with a texture of the Earth - which would be doable, it seems. The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, and so the Earth will always be near the same point in the sky of the moon. Also, it’s 4x the diameter. Also, no atmosphere, so any traces of that due to it being integrated with the sky system are problematic.
This is something I’d really love to have for my project to make an advanced lunar town in a realistic setting, for film making. I hope it sees use and development continues. I love this kind of stuff.
Hi,
I totally got your point, but this system is meant to be used from the Earth perspective.
That said, you might want to have a look at the plugin code and at the Celestial Maths Blueprint function library included. There are functions to compute the Moon location in heliocentric space, same as for the Earth, using VSOP87 functions.
That way, you might be able to load the RA,DEC of the star catalog, and convert them to other coordinate systems. I’m not saying this is easy, but it could be an approach if you’re not afraid of Math.
I have no plan to have the system working from any perspective of the solar system, it’s not such a frequent case.
But Maybe the NASA DUST Tool would help you better…
This helped me set up my jupyter notebook better and I found a lot of benefits from this tutorial. I am just struggling with the photoshop part, I am using GIMP and managed to create 173 rows of data in total but I feel the magnitude was not translating to unreal engine. I am not sure if this has to do with the pixel size 1000X1500 or If I am not generating enough data points.
When I open the fictionalstarsbuilder.xlsx the data points didn’t sync properly either. There was a number of outliers that jumped off from the export within the .py file.
In this image I used the first 173 rows from the export I generated from my samurai constellation from the UE logo because I wanted the RGB values to be the same (hence the blank streak through the logo) however, those data points were stretched over the global sphere and not compacted like the UE logo was.
I am fairly confident this is due to my photoshop skills but I couldn’t follow the instructions that well because I was using GIMP instead of paint.net.
Your work is impressive btw, I am just trying to wrap my head around the logic under the hood with the data points.
Hi there, this is awesome, thanks! I haven’t been able to find Celestial Vault documentation about it’s general use. Could someone please copy the link to that info here? Thanks in advance!
Hi guys,
Thanks for the feedback. And sorry for the lack of official documentation. It has been written (I did it!), but it still needs to be integrated properly in the official EDC website by our doc team. They are working very hard, but there are so many new stuff in 5.6 that it’s longer than expected.
Once the official page will be there, I’ll provide a link here.