Make the space scene of your dreams using Space Graphics Toolkit. This huge collection of space effects can be customized and combined in any way you like, allowing you to quickly make realistic or fantasy worlds.
Enhance your space scenes using this large pack of high detail volumetric planets. These planets are finished using the powerful planet features from Space Graphics Toolkit (not required).
This looks like some great work. Is there any chance you could add some demo webplayer scenes showing off the features for us to check out? Would definitely encourage people to buy if its as awesome as it sounds
Thanks. I’ll definitely release a demo scene in a day or two. But more importantly, I plan to make some semi-decent videos showing how to use the components to achieve various graphical effects without much hassle.
Nope it’s still there, the asset also contains a demo scene that creates a separate scene as a background, and comes with a pdf detailing how to set it up yourself. I didn’t realize it was such an important feature to highlight so I didn’t mention it here, I’ll definitely get around to making a section about this.
Sorry, couldn’t wait for the demo so I bought it…
Only problem is now that we have guests round so I can’t sit on the computer playing with it!! And I have to go to work early tomorrow (nooOOOOoo!!) So I won’t get to play around and marvel at it all until late tomorrow afternoon (GMT.) Will give you feedback ASAP!!
EDIT:
One thing does spring to mind, though, without even testing it - it’s a feature request, and I know you’ve touched upon the subject in the original thread and discounted the idea as it would perhaps be too specific to a certain situation, but it would be absolutely PHENOMENAL if you could include the ability to fly to the surface of the planets and have the surface procedurally generated or something. I’m far from being a competent coder to manage that myself, but could probably tweak my work-in-progress to fit whatever system you came up with…
UPDATE:
Just had a quick flick through the demo scenes - ab-so-lutely frikkin’ awesome!!! Not only do the planets and gas giants look realistic, they’re beautiful too!! I love the asteroid fields - already I’m thinking of a way to add colliders to the ones that are within a certain range of the camera… I’m sure for performance reasons it’d kill the computer to calculate collisions on them all…
Can’t wait to sit down with this tomorrow and spend some real time looking at how it all works and seeing if I can swap an alien planet from this package into my project.
Love the sunrise/sunset within the atmosphere - but this is CLEARLY demanding some sort of system to allow the player to visit the surface of a planet!!! That’s gotta be top of the priority list for future updates, surely?!
One other thing - and sorry for the lack of technical or astronomy-related jargon - but when viewing a planet with atmosphere from the dark side, so you see the lovely thin orange line of dawn breaking, I think it should be brighter if that makes any sense? Or perhaps could do with just a little more work to make it look spectacular.
Thanks so much for putting this together - I’d say it’s worth every penny now, but that would definitely be the case if you add planet surfaces…
Haha, I guess this isn’t one feature I can’t reason my way out of adding.
I can fairly easily write (and will over the next few days) a component to tessellate a planet’s surface, thus giving you dynamic LOD no matter where on the surface of a planet you’re on. But it’s kind of a rabbit hole of features, oh well!
Thanks! I also have some ideas on how to make them look even better, but I’ll stick to one thing at a time
I will eventually implement this in the pack, the main issue you’ll probably come across is that the asteroid positions aren’t directly stored in the mesh, so you can’t easily find which ones are near the camera. To make this calculation more sensible I’ll most likely have to change the way the asteroid generator plots the orbits. But if you find an efficient way to do this with the current setup then let me know.
I think I know what you mean. I just noticed my atmosphere texture blending causes the sunrise/sunsets to just be flat colours, this definitely shouldn’t be the case. I’ll have it fixed in the next release.
Just picked this up last night and have to say this pack is just awesome. I’ve been wanting to make a space game for a while and this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. One question though, I know this is a graphics pack, but is there any possibility you might add a gravity script to it in the future? It would be handy for my ships flying around to to be affected by the planets gravity. But hey, understandable if you don’t. And again, amazing pack, I’m certainly going to get a lot of use out of it.
Purchased this because well it is very cool and I can see potential in some work I want to do. Question, do you plan to add things like gas clouds and particle effects for when travelling through space and the like. Nothing could be sweeter than being able to see that huge cool looking gas cloud in the distance and then travelling through it etc.
Looking forward to your updates can’t wait to see where you take this.
It’s not finished yet, but here’s a small progress report on the surface LOD component. You can see the planet’s surface mesh increase in detail the closer the camera gets to it. The gaps/seams in the terrain are what I’m working on fixing right now.
Thanks! And thanks for helping test it
Thanks! I guess I could add a gravity component. Your ships are physics objects using the rigidbody component right?
Yes, gas clouds are one fairly large feature that’s currently absent from this pack and I definitely plan on adding them in the future.
As for the particle effects as you travel through space, I was very close to writing such a component and including it in the initial release. But I decided that I’ll freeze my current feature set and actually release the first build as it was already delayed quite a lot. They will definitely be included fairly soon though!
Indeed they are, And thank you so much if you do add that in. and love the sneak peak, I’m currently working on recreating our solar system and being able to land ships on mars with better quality planetary surfaces will just be amazing. Also I gotta thank you for the wonderful highres textures in the pack, I only just noticed that they where in the texture folder. My ISS model looks amazing orbiting around earth with those textures (especially as it passes over the night side).
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Being a Wing Commander junkie, this will definitely help me make my levels look very nice and save me a lot of time with my development.
I hope this project is successful enough for you cause I’d love to see development continue further!
The only thing I’d ask is if possible, please break up the PDF documentation into separate pages; I wanted to print out the Planet and other documentation but it’s formatted as one long page of text and images.
Now off to play with some asteroid fields and other stuff!
This shows Earth from fairly close up, and as you can see I’ve now fixed the terrain seams with the dynamic LOD. The surface uses a 4096x2048 texture, so each texel represents a region of under 10km (9.7km at the equator).
I mentioned earlier that adding this was going to be a rabbit hole of features, and I’m sure you may be able to see why; While the terrain mesh now looks more detailed up close, the terrain texture doesn’t. So if I release it now, I know everyone will request that I add support for detail maps. If I add detail maps, then they would have to only be applied to the land parts of the planet, but then the sea would look boring and flat. Eventually I’ll have to separate the land from the sea, but I will leave that for another release.
Thanks! Let me know if/when you post pictures of your project, I’d love to see it
Thanks, and me too! Haha, I didn’t think people would actually print it out, but duly noted. I’ll split the documentation up for the next release.
This keeps getting better and better. With the terrain though, are you allowing it to be modified with the terrain tools also to put foliage and stuff on it? And the ability to flatten it out, etc?
If so I’ll buy it right now.
I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for the terrain tools to interface with any user components. In the future I may write such tools, but the terrain isn’t the main focus of this pack, so I don’t want to spend all my time on it. Right now, the height is based on a height map texture (of equirectangular projection) that you specify, so you can just draw a solid colour in some area if you want flat terrain. Currently there’s no built in method to place objects on the surface, so I’ll have to think about that. But it will most likely look different to the way you plot stuff on Unity terrains, because you can have any number of planets, so it would be incredibly inefficient to plot all your trees outside of runtime.
Thats understandable. I have thought of a work around already to it. Would be great to just generate great looking planets. Which you already are doing.
Thank you for answering.
Update: Alright… you sold me on it… I can see this helping me out. Thanks!
