Poodmund

Haha, yeah, thanks for the confirmation of it. I knew I was getting it wrong but I also knew why it what wrong as you explained above, I was getting the fingers out, Fleming's Left Hand Rule style, to visualise it but what you are suggesting makes sense. I'll go have a tinker and post the results.

Try and boost the skyextinctionGroundFade and extinctionScatterIntensity values up a bit basically to give you more of a thick cloud mist appearance. I also bumped up the experimentalAtmoScale up to 2.5 to give it a bit of thickness.

I can use the X offset to adjust the Longitude but when adjusting the Z offset is does change the original latitude of the texture but it still rotates around the Y axis pole on the equator so you get a warbling effect. Beware the incoming massive .gifs... ^ Works fine with no Z offset. ^ With a offset at Z the texture rotates around the Y axis pole sitting at 0 Latitude which creates a standing wave like warble. Getting confused here. I ideally want the Z axis to work for the the offset but then not apply when the rotation is applied.

@rbray89 I am trying to replicate a hurricane by using one cube face with the hurricane texture's, storm eye directly in the center of the texture. I apply it in game, say as the Top Face and change the rotationAxis1 to be 1,0,0 so that the texture rotates with its axes through the eye... creating a spinning storm. I can change the speed of the rotation of the storm by increasing the speed parameter as 0,x,0. This is all desirable but when it comes to locking down the eye of the storm to a specific place over the planet/moon I am having trouble. I can change the Z value of the offset to change the Latitude of the storm but as I have locked down the other two axis of rotation into the same plane I cannot then change the offset of the X or Y to change the Longitude of the storm so that I could, for example, have two storms 10 degrees South of the equator, but on opposite sides of the sphere. Any ideas?

Its also worth nothing that NathanKell has mentioned that the shaders are going to be modified slightly for the upcoming 1.1.1 release which will probably make the planets/moons less bright/shiny again so it may be prudent to wait for that to happen also.

I am pretty sure it was an issue with Kopernicus' On Demand Load of which Thomas P has already pushed a fix in the dev branch of Kopernicus. I have been running it tonight and no crashes so far so it seems its been rectified. As an aside, with NathanKell explaining in the KSPRC thread that 1.1.1 is to include 'fixes' to some shaders, I will have to redo all the textures and the cloud config colour/alpha settings for the pack to get the colour balance and lightness looking correct... this is a good thing though. Its best to get this out the way early rather than having to do it again later down the line. So rest assured in that this won't be coming out before 1.1.1... but it seems 1.1.1 will be coming out sooner rather than later.

Hooray, my favourite KSP Mod is now 1.1 compatible. Thanks for you continued work, Hoojiwana!

Will this have a benefit performance wise with Volumetrics or will it still be invoking the same amount of samplers as 3 separate?

Still working on getting low level EVE clouds to visually blend properly with Scatterer as some of the techniques have changed slightly. I think it will be for the better. I'm also getting some weird crashes that may or may not be related to anything to do with this mod but its taking some of my time looking into it. Anyway... have a teaser... Be aware that I did take the liberty to Photoshop the shadow on the rings to try and convince Blackrack to prioritize its functionality in Scatterer (hehe) as it looks simply gorgeous but everything else is completely untouched in-game screenshot. I will also be putting some hurricane systems down on Tekto at low level. I have an idea as to how I can get them to actually rotate around the storm's eye but this may take some time tinkering so at first I think I'll just keep them as conventional cloud maps. @jpinard, unfortunately I won't be supporting 1.0.5 and won't be updating previous releases to work with 1.1 as I don't think it'd be worth my time. I'll concentrate focus on getting this new build ready for 1.1 first and hope to get something out soon after a 1.1 compatible OPM build is released.

Let it be known also that you do not have to utilise all 3 or 4 channels, you could merge just 2 images into a 3 channel RGB image and leave one of the channels blank... but that kind of defeats the purpose/gain of this technique. I am glad you guys can follow the process because I can't wait to see what you can pull off with it.

Stealing! God no... I'm just so glad that thing issue has finally got the attention it deserved because the forums were an absolute mess a while back.

Wrote up a tutorial with explanatory images of how to get EVE's Cube Map system working. If you compare the file size of 4No. 8k DXT5 .dds Cloud Maps to just 1 set of 2k DXT5 .dds Cube Maps, you get over a 700% saving in files size by implementing the 4 cloud maps into one single Cube Map. Quite impressive. Paging @Nhawks17, @Proot and @pingopete for reference.

Tutorial: Setting Up EVE Cube Maps In this tutorial we will be looking at how to take advantage of EVE's Cube Map system to layer up to 4 textures onto a single cube map to reduce file size within mod distributions. This method will be outlining the process of taking 4 Equirectangular Cloud Maps, converting them to a single image by putting them into the Red, Green, Blue and Alpha channels, converting it to a Cube Map and setting it up for use in-game with EVE. ***Please Note: All the images below are clickable thumbnails to 1080p images*** ---- 1. Source your Cloud Map (or whatever you want to use) images from wherever. Google Images, NASA, your own creations etc. and ensure that they are all sized correctly in an Equirectangular format; as what has always previously been used in EVE & KSP i.e. Width = 2 x Height. You can use up to 4 image maps at this stage. Below, I have shown a 8192px x 4096px cloud map that has a transparent background. 2. Your images will need to be converted to Greyscale, flat images where the light portions will be the clouds and the dark portions of your image will be the transparent parts in game on your cloud layer i.e. the opacity of the pixel scales with brightness. Therefore, at this stage just edit your cloud map to have a black background with your cloud map layer over the top. 3. Do this for all 4 of your textures and save them as .bmp. For ease of use, I'd recommend naming them something simple like red.bmp, green.bmp, blue.bmp and alpha.bmp or 1.bmp, 2.bmp etc. 4. Open your Equirectangular to Cube Map conversion software, I recommend CubeTheSphere or Hugin (I will be using CubeTheSphere in this tutorial), and load in and convert your images to Cube Maps. In CubeTheSphere open your Equirectangular .bmp image and then select the individual cube face image size to be 2048px x 2048px under the Options toolbar. This will result in the output Cube Map to roughly equate to the same resolution as the 8k Equirectangular image. 5. Extract all the faces of the Cube Map to give you your 6 individual images being the Front, Back, Left, Right, Top and Bottom sides of the map. Do this for all of your 4 cloud maps. This may take some time as your computer is rendering out the images for each face of the cube. Be patient. 6. Now you need to rename the faces to correlate with EVE's naming conventions. In EVE the following sides of the Cube are given as X Positive, X Negative, Y Positive, Y Negative, Z Positive and Z Negative. Seeing as we will finally be outputting the textures for KSP in .dds format, we will need to name the sides of the faces upside down as .dds flips the image vertically when saving. For ease of use, use the following guide to help you rename the files: Xp : Right Xn : Left Yp : Bottom Yn : Top Zp : Front Zn : Back So you should end up with something like the following list of files for each of your cloud maps: redXp.bmp (Right Image) redXn.bmp (Left Image) redYp.bmp (Bottom Image) redYn.bmp (Top Image) redZp.bmp (Front Image) redZn.bmp (Back Image) 7. Once you have your cube maps for all your 4 cloud map textures, go back into Photoshop and load the first 3 X-Positive face images. i.e. redXp.bmp, greenXp.bmp & blueXp.bmp 8. Convert each of the images to Greyscale. Confirm to 'Discard' when asked. 9. Ensure that each of the images is flattened. 10. Navigate to the Channels panel and select the 'Merge Channels' button from the drop down menu. 11. The Merge Channels menu should pop up where you can select the RGB option from the drop down menu, select the 'RGB' option and 3 channels and click 'OK'. 12. In the next menu select the appropriate image for each of the corresponding colour channels. Click 'OK' to merge the images into one image. 13. As a result you will end up with something similar to what is shown below. By toggling the visibility of each of the colour channels you can see you individual textures appear on their separated colour channels. 14. To add the 4th cloud map, cube map face texture to the image, we will be putting it into the Alpha Channel. To do this, in the Channels panel click 'Create New Channel' to add another channel to the image. This will by default apply a solid black mask to this channel which will act as the alpha channel. 15. Open up the 4th appropriate cube map face in Photoshop (in this examples case the alphaXp.bmp), convert it to Greyscale as before and select all the image and cut/copy it. 16. In the Channels panel with the new Alpha channel selected as the Active Channel, paste the image into this channel. You should see it appear similarly to what is shown below when only the Alpha channel is toggled visible. 17. At this stage, toggle the RGB channels on and the Alpha channel off and save the resulting texture as a DXT5 .dds texture. I have shown my nVidia dds configs below during the saving process. When saving the .dds texture, make sure to name them '******Xp.dds' for ease of use later i.e. cloudsXp.dds 18. Repeat steps 7 through 17 another 5 times for each side of the Cube Map and you should end up with 6 .dds textures with your 4 cloud maps appearing on the 4 separate channels named: ********Xp.dds ********Xn.dds ********Yp.dds ********Yn.dds ********Zp.dds ********Zn.dds These are the final textures that will be used in-game. Copy them to your Textures directory inside your mod directory. 19. EVE requires a separate config to know how to handle cube maps. This file can be located anywhere in your mod directory but must be named 'textures.cfg. I always recommend the use of the EVE GUI to edit the configs as no syntax or parameter errors can be made but for this demonstration I will be listing the config structure below as I assume the knowledge and familiarity with EVE's GUI. The Textures config can be found in the TextureConfig panel in the GUI. In this config, you will be required to list the following information: Cube Map = True and paths to each of the cube map faces. i.e. EVE_TEXTURE_CONFIG { OBJECT { name = Mod/Textures/imageName isCubeMap = True texXn = Mod/Textures/imageNameXn texYn = Mod/Textures/imageNameYn texZn = Mod/Textures/imageNameZn texXp = Mod/Textures/imageNameXp texYp = Mod/Textures/imageNameYp texZp = Mod/Textures/imageNameZp } } 20. Once EVE knows to recognise the 6 images as a Cube Map, you can navigate to your Celestial Body's Cloud Manager in the CloudManager Panel in the GUI and add a cloud layer. You can name this layer whatever you wish and input your specific settings for altitude, speed etc. 21. Toggle the MainTex option and input the path to your texture; this will be as specified in the Texture Config section i.e. Mod/Textures/imageName 22. Change the RGBA setting by default to AlphaCubeMap. If done correctly up until this stage, the image path should be displaying as white text. 23. Scroll down the GUI and toggle the 'layer2D' option so that it renders the cloud texture as a graphic in ScaledSpace/PQS. 24. At this stage you can hit Save and Apply and EVE should now render, by default, the cloud map you specified to be in the Alpha channel of your Cube Map. If following my instructions above with regards to the alignment of the cube faces using CubeTheSphere it should be aligned correctly. If using other software or this is not the case, you may need to play around with the sides of which your textures are appearing on the Cube Map. 25. To change the rendering of the cloud map to that of the Red, Green or Blue channels, cycle through the 'alphaMask' option to switch between your 4 cloud map textures. 26. At this stage you should be finished and able to choose between 4 different cloud maps by using only 6 cube map textures. Hooray! From here you can go back into your cloud layers and edit the parameters of them to how you wish to configure your EVE Cloud Layer to appear. ---- For reference, if you were to use 4 separate 8k DXT5 .dds textures for the 4 cloud maps, the resultant total file size would be 170MB. By combining these 4 maps into a single 2k DXT5 .dds Cube Map the resultant total file size is only 24MB... more than a 700% saving! Imgur Album of the above Tutorial Images for your reference: A big thank you and shout out to @rbray89 for making all of this possible with EVE and the continous support that he has given when we badger him with questions. EVE Forum link: I hope that you found this helpful and will be an aid in your endeavour to create better and more efficient visual packs for EVE. If you have any queries, feel free to ask by pinging me with an @Poodmund tag in this thread.

Did you switch to this vessel from another vessel in orbit?

@blackrack I would just like to say thank you so much for your continued work. Firstly, since the merge of EVE-Overhaul into the main branch it was no longer easily possible to create a thick fuzzy atmospheric glow around celestial bodies. With your addition of the experimentalAtmoScale and skyextinctionGroundFade variables it is now again easy to create a thick atmosphere like effect. I can finally do a Titan like atmosphere effect without spamming cloud layers in EVE. Secondly, as I know that you were working on shadow casting onto planetary rings I am going to leave this screenshot here that is completely untouched apart from the shadow being applied in Photoshop. I hope that you agree that it really transforms the image into a believable like image and hope that it will make it into Scatterer some day.

I use Photoshop but thanks to your explanation of the GIMP method I've figured it out in PS. You have to have your 3 images open in Photoshop, all in Greyscale and all Flattened. Then go to the Channels Panel and select 'Merge Channels' from the drop down box. This should merge the 3 images into 3 channels that you can call Red, Green and Blue. You can also then create an Alpha Channel if you want to put a 4th image layer mask into the image. Its all working in game now. @Nhawks17 & @Proot, if you need any assistance figuring this out in Photoshop if you haven't already by this point don't hesitate to poke me. EDIT: You can also save them in DXT5 .dds if you want the 4 channel texture. 8k texture with 4 different cloud images coming out at 32mb.

You can find the Texture Replacer mod here: https://github.com/ducakar/TextureReplacer/releases/ and my Skyboxes can be found here: Link Thanks for your kind words. I have most of the Scatterer work redone. Its looking nice, the new features and tweaks added since like 3 months ago really bring out the best in Scatterer. I have taken into consideration the criticism made in this thread about Tekto not appearing like Titan enough and have changed its look using Scatterer enough to replicate a thick fuzzy atmosphere much like what was possible in the old EVE. There will still be thick, stormy cloud layers present and fog on the surface but it will render beneath Scatterers' fuzz so the clouds will become more apparent the lower you get in altitude. A little teaser of Tekto with only Scatterer effects applied... no clouds yet. EDIT: Also, jpinard, you can drop the 0.1.2 or 0.1.3 Pre-release of this mod into your 1.1 build and it is likely that it will work to some extent. It did for me on a fresh 1.1 build with the dependent mods installed as this mod is really just textures and configs which should not be affected by the 1.1 update. However, with 1.1's new lighting, it looks way too bright and weird. Its up to you if you want to experiment or not.

@rbray89 @Nhawks17 @Proot I am having trouble getting the 'layered' textures to appear properly when separating them through the Red, Green and Blue channels. I have tried with uncompressed .pngs and DXT5 .dds (and also what I expected to work, 8.8.8.8 .dds but EVE doesn't recognize this format). Is there something I am doing fundamentally wrong during the file saving process that is causing the texture not to render correctly when selecting it to display only a certain channel?

Yep, that worked perfectly. Thanks.

@blackrack, is the Extinction Tint always a turquoise green/blue no matter what textures you export from Proland and what values you specify in the configs under m_betaR = #,#,#? Currently working on setting up Sarnus and with a turquoise extinction is looks a bit funky.

Early tests show that it works somewhat... however, the changes to Scatterer have caused all the planets/moons to appear super bright. At this stage I feel the best way forward would to just write everything from scratch again in a new 1.1 build. I have all the textures and base configs from the previous version so it shouldn't be too painful.

Scatter is not 'technically' necessary as any part of the mod that requires another 'dependency' to functions will just cease to function if that mod is not installed, ergo, but not running Scatterer you will not see its atmospheric effects from Map View, Orbital Vew (Scaled Space) or down at PQS level. That being said I the other parts of the mod have been and will be set up to work with Scatterer so mileage may vary for you if you're not using it. Now that 1.1 is out, I will get to work on getting this out for a final Pre-Release once a 1.1 compatible build of OPM is released.

When OPM has a 1.1 compatible build released, give me a week or so and I'll try to get something turned round.

Thanks, I will look into it when I have some spare time. Thank you for your help, I'll message you if I find or need anything else.

Could you please boot up KSP, go to the Tracking Center, switch to a ship in an orbit around Tekto... wait for any cloud layers to appear (or not), switch back to the Tracking Center and quit KSP? Once that is done, can you then immediately upload your KSP.log file so that I could take a look through it to see if I can spot why it is not working. @majestique and I discussed this issue through PMs and sometimes it randomly worked and sometimes did not. We didn't really get to the bottom of it.