Solar Effects
Author
Does anyone have any suggestions of how to make a realistic looking Sun without the use of Vertex or Pixel shaders? I'm writing a space game, and my sun looks rather bland right now... I'm looking for suggestions on how to spice it up.
Thanks
Spice it up with a few nice textures and some alpha blending.
How are you drawing your sun right now?
How are you drawing your sun right now?
Author
Quote:Original post by Moe
Spice it up with a few nice textures and some alpha blending.
How are you drawing your sun right now?
Well, I'm using 4 textures. One that came with truespace, and the others are the same texture just kindof smudged around. I animate the sun by changing the textures every few milliseconds. Then I alpha blend 3 larger copies of the Sun to give it a little bit of a glow. It doesn't look terrible... just rather unimpressive. Maybe I just need better textures, or more of them. But I was hoping to get something that looked kindof like this:
any ideas?
An animated corona might help. Depending on how close the camera gets to it, something as simple as a billboarded animated sprite can look great.
Damn.. that looks rather nice. Kind of what I want to do next. Right now I'm doing a stupid 2D space game. Next I want to do a 3D space game.
Author
Quote:Original post by demiurgeinc
Damn.. that looks rather nice. Kind of what I want to do next. Right now I'm doing a stupid 2D space game. Next I want to do a 3D space game.
Yeah, I thought so too. This is a screen shot from "Cell Block Squadrons" which is actually an indie game developed by a couple of brothers out of Australia. Check it out if you get a chance www.superfurious.com. One of them has actually helped me a little on my game. My game initially had a 80MB download, and he gave me some pointers that allowed me to get it down to around 15MB.
I may ask how they did this effect, but they're busy people and I hate to be a pest. Hopefully someone in this forum will have some good examples. It's possible that it's just a lot of billboards and alpha blending... but it still looks much better than what I'm doing with alpha blending and billboard. Maybe it's just because my art work is crappy.
Wow, that is pretty impressive!
I do think a nice bright corona could add a bit to the look. Either that or crank the brightness of the sun up a bit more. If you think about how bright the real sun is, it is so bright that you can't even look at it for extended periods of time.
Looks good!
I do think a nice bright corona could add a bit to the look. Either that or crank the brightness of the sun up a bit more. If you think about how bright the real sun is, it is so bright that you can't even look at it for extended periods of time.
Looks good!
Author
Quote:Original post by DirectXFreak
If you could PM me some of those pointers, that would be great. :-D
Are you speaking of the pointers to reduce the size of your download?
That's a damn nice looking Sun. However, as a suggestion, perhaps you should cut down a bit on the dark bits and have a bit more of fire and orange stuff?
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