Atmosphere Tests

I’ve done some initial color tests for the atmosphere and terrain. I wanted to see what a yellow atmosphere with a blue star would look like and how the atmospheric scattering would effect red colored plant life. The sunlight has a slight bluish color (rather then pure white or yellow/red) and the “red sky” effect is blue and the “blue sky” color is now yellow. When using semi-physically based rendering methods, this naturally generates interesting gradients and sunsets.

In this blog post you will see screenshots that I generated using an existing program, so you can think of these as programmer “concept art.” The terrain engine for this project hasn’t even been started yet, I’m still working on getting my other projects to a certain stage first. However I will continue to do concept work on this project with existing code from other projects, programs and small test apps so when I do start I’ll have everything well planned – essential for a project this large.

Atmosphere test screenshots:

Sunset.

Mid-Morning. The sky is yellow and the sun blue.

Approaching midday.

You can see the atmospheric scattering mixing with the red “grass” and rock. Note that this is a color test, the final texturing will look much better. Also this is not final terrain, just a mix of two noise based fractals at different scales for now.

Ground Color Test.

It’s interesting to see that physically based algorithms can generate an alien atmosphere. This has been a short post this time, but I’ll talk more about the world and of course the AI in future posts.

As usual, any comments are welcome.

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