mindseyemodels

Clouds is just blackrack working his magic... the rest of the team is working on colonies and bugfixes as well as visual improvements and heat management @Nerdy_Mike since you guys are doing that awesome work on exhaust plumes, are we gonna get more reentry improvements this next couple updates? Please let there be sparks at least. I imagine the VFX team is working to blend the current style with what we saw in the SpaceX and artemis 1 reentry videos

PLEASE tell me there are more VFX fixes and improvements for reentry soon

Unironically we need more units of measurements in terms of speed and distance

Are there going to be vfx improvements for reentry anytime soon? I hope the reentry vfx get improvements in the next few updates

here is one of my screenshots of reentry. note the heat shield not being illuminated the way the science jr jr is. and again the transparency issue i mention so much as the effect is almost completely invisible in front of ship parts and below is my improvements to the above image made in Krita. note how the heat shield is now illuminated and the bright white ring goes all the way around the heat shield. and also blurs the edges of the science jr jr. also the sparks added are a much welcome improvement. makes it far more dynamic looking... basically these improvements not only make the reentry look better, they make it look hotter and more dangerous as well. as for performance, from my experience in other games sprite based particles like this have next to no performance impact. and once part occlusion for reentry is fleshed out more (having sparks and plasma only come from exposed parts) it will be far more performant as the number of spark particle emitters would be culled drastically of course i must ask @Nate Simpson for his feedback about this and also feedback from the current technical artists... whoever it is that works with vfx like reentry and things of the sort

your effect looks really good, i really hope the devs implement soft edges like you did. one detail i especially like is that the reentry flames are visible in front of ship parts which is not the case for a lot of instances in-game. the flames ingame have to be VERY bright for them to be visible at all in front of ship parts

personally my ONLY gripes with the reentry effect is that it is entirely too transparent when looking at ships through it. like instead of seeing half the ship obscured, you hardly see the effect at all in front of your ship, even at extremely high speeds the fireball doesn't obscure the ship

i noticed @Aaron VFX had liked this post. what an honor. so what do you think? would this idea be feasible? it certainly is beautiful. and quite realistic considering it would bring reentry closer in line with pics like this

@Dakota i know this community well enough to know that NOT showing these issues will NOT go well with the community and will just give them ammo to use against ksp2 and it's dev team

eh not really. bowshock in reentry is like a plasma equivalent to the water frothing you see in front of a boat when it's moving fast and in this case a simple shader would do the job nicely. a slightly enlarged but MASSIVELY shortened version of the reentry effect but WAY brighter to cause bloom to give it that hazy glow of the supercompressed plasma right at the leading edges of the plasma trail

huh... that's funny because my rtx 3060TI does really well getting AT LEAST 40fps (60 on average)... it's almost like it runs differently on different machines

@Nate Simpson so now that i figured out you can directly ping people on the forums. what do you think of my idea? i need to hear what the creative director of ksp2 thinks about my idea for visual improvements and it is the best chance i have of hearing what the actual developers think

and uuuuuhhh. when can we maybe expect this? we are all collectively running out of patience when it comes to the lack of transparency... like we know you have something coming up but WHAT is coming up? and we are also a little tired of the statements from Dakota that say approximately nothing while also using a lot of words... just please give us something like ANYTHING regardless of if it's under NDA. despite what you guys say, the reentry video you shared a few weeks ago was the most behind the scenes information we have had since EA release

that's a pretty good idea until you get to larger and more intricate crafts then the particle effects start to really get out of hand and i imagine they would really bog down performance btw i just gotta ask you... since this thread is about reentry effects, can we expect to see videos soon on how they change when first entering the atmosphere or accelerating to orbital speed in atmosphere? like how in ksp1 it would start with a faint glow and a few licks of flame, then before long it's a raging inferno around the ship. or how mach cones would transition to plasma trails.

Someone pointed out that a method that is better in terms of performance is instead of lights to make the Bloom for bowshock. You instead have a third layer of shader for bowshock. And make it REALLY bright as to give Bloom. So you have 3 layers of shader going from inner to outer, You have fire/plasma, sparks, then bow shock. the posts and comments i made earlier have been retroactively edited for this idea Illustrated here is the concept in 2d. Solid line=fire, dotted line=sparks, and radiant line= bowshock. The length of the radiant lines show brightness and or opacity. The first sketch is supposed to be the current single shader