[1.9-1.12.x] EVE-Redux: Performance-enhanced EVE + maintenance (v1.11.7.1 - 09/09/2022)

[rbray89]

22 hours ago, blackrack said:

There's a bit of that but something else feels off, not sure what. Maybe the lack of shadows, the scale is a bit off and contrast with the planet textures. Either way will do more tests later.

I think the issue is that the clouds are all uniformly very dense. You have no "whisps" or foggy clouds.

[blackrack]

14 minutes ago, rbray89 said:

I think the issue is that the clouds are all uniformly very dense. You have no "whisps" or foggy clouds.

Finally managed to draw you out

[MrPoker]

Wait, If the volumetrics are done, will blackrack post a message saying it's done? For people having notifications on like me.

[Vandest]

blackrack always post a message when a new release is done, don't worry. 

But if you follow this topic, you will be notified each time some one post a message. And if you only follow blackrack, you will be notified each time he post a message everywhere on forum. It's up to you to pick what you prefer.

[MrPoker]

8 hours ago, Vandest said:

blackrack always post a message when a new release is done, don't worry. 

But if you follow this topic, you will be notified each time some one post a message. And if you only follow blackrack, you will be notified each time he post a message everywhere on forum. It's up to you to pick what you prefer.

I pick both

[Poodmund]

14 hours ago, rbray89 said:

I think the issue is that the clouds are all uniformly very dense. You have no "whisps" or foggy clouds.

14 hours ago, blackrack said:

Finally managed to draw you out

This was my initial thought too in that a lot of cloud cover is in the form of Cirrus clouds which, when combined with the ones we have seen from the screenshot or faded with (on an opacity scale), would break up the tiled nature of what we see.

I'm sure you know what clouds look like, Blackrack, but just to emphasise my statement: 

 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by Poodmund

[blackrack]

2 hours ago, Poodmund said:

This was my initial thought too in that a lot of cloud cover is in the form of Cirrus clouds which, when combined with the ones we have seen from the screenshot or faded with (on an opacity scale), would break up the tiled nature of what we see.

I'm sure you know what clouds look like, Blackrack, but just to emphasise my statement: 

 

 

This will probably inflate the GPU budget, and I'll hate authoring maps in photoshop but this looks like the way to go. Luckily configuring Cirrus clouds should be relatively easy.

Edited:

Btw @Poodmund@rbray89I thought about this some more and I think it's only part of the answer (though an important part). I remembered that star citizen has a single cloud type which is like a cumulus buffed up to ridiculous proportions ( and tiny detached puffs around), but it looks undoubtedly great from orbit

There is no visible tiling but apart from that something about the shapes and distribution just works. This planet I think is about 1.5x the size of Kerbin so it's also not a scale issue.

Edited May 12, 2022 by blackrack

[G'th]

Hmm, so something I think might be in play here is whatever map you used to define the cloud shapes. Would this map basically be the same thing as a 2d cloud map like EVE typically uses?

Id imagine that if your examples were handpainted, that may be using some actual clouds might be better?

It might also be that, from what I can see, the clouds you have thus far are basically just dot spatters. Clouds can appear like that, but most big cloud formations, like in the Star Citizen shot, aren't just a series of dots or spatters. But I also don't know the specifics in what went into those shapes so I could be offbase. 

Plus something else I think is happening here is that the clouds don't seem to be "in" the atmosphere. Both the Star Citizen screenshots and the picture Poodmund posted don't have this issue, and you can tell that even in the whitest part of the clouds that theres still a subtle blue tinge to them. 

Thats even something Ive faced more than once with regular EVE, in that forcing the clouds to be too starkly white makes them not feel like they're actually part of the atmosphere. (And inversely, that taking away too much or the scattering also does the same thing) 

They look right when youre down below them, but then it seems like the scattering just doesn't apply to them as you climb in altitude. 

 

[SpaceCube2000]

11 minutes ago, G'th said:

Hmm, so something I think might be in play here is whatever map you used to define the cloud shapes. Would this map basically be the same thing as a 2d cloud map like EVE typically uses?

Id imagine that if your examples were handpainted, that may be using some actual clouds might be better?

It might also be that, from what I can see, the clouds you have thus far are basically just dot spatters. Clouds can appear like that, but most big cloud formations, like in the Star Citizen shot, aren't just a series of dots or spatters. But I also don't know the specifics in what went into those shapes so I could be offbase. 

Plus something else I think is happening here is that the clouds don't seem to be "in" the atmosphere. Both the Star Citizen screenshots and the picture Poodmund posted don't have this issue, and you can tell that even in the whitest part of the clouds that theres still a subtle blue tinge to them. 

Thats even something Ive faced more than once with regular EVE, in that forcing the clouds to be too starkly white makes them not feel like they're actually part of the atmosphere. (And inversely, that taking away too much or the scattering also does the same thing) 

They look right when youre down below them, but then it seems like the scattering just doesn't apply to them as you climb in altitude. 

 

I have thought for a long time that the clouds in EVE were too high in altitude. Do you think decreasing the altitude of the clouds would improve their appearance? 

[blackrack]

28 minutes ago, G'th said:

Hmm, so something I think might be in play here is whatever map you used to define the cloud shapes. Would this map basically be the same thing as a 2d cloud map like EVE typically uses?

Id imagine that if your examples were handpainted, that may be using some actual clouds might be better?

It might also be that, from what I can see, the clouds you have thus far are basically just dot spatters. Clouds can appear like that, but most big cloud formations, like in the Star Citizen shot, aren't just a series of dots or spatters. But I also don't know the specifics in what went into those shapes so I could be offbase. 

Plus something else I think is happening here is that the clouds don't seem to be "in" the atmosphere. Both the Star Citizen screenshots and the picture Poodmund posted don't have this issue, and you can tell that even in the whitest part of the clouds that theres still a subtle blue tinge to them. 

Thats even something Ive faced more than once with regular EVE, in that forcing the clouds to be too starkly white makes them not feel like they're actually part of the atmosphere. (And inversely, that taking away too much or the scattering also does the same thing) 

They look right when youre down below them, but then it seems like the scattering just doesn't apply to them as you climb in altitude. 

 

For now I just used noise as textures and in the previous images I used a standard cloud map for the distribution and overlaid some noise above for the other properties, the scale of such a map is wrong of course for Kerbin.

Yeah handpainting maps is what I've been putting off because it's time consuming, but I will test doing it in small sections, or maybe test at earth scale first.

For the SC clouds, they're actually completely blue even when you fly inside them, that's probably either a baked-in blue tint or a strong skylight multiplier, I tested adding skylight but didn't get the results I wanted yet.

The shapes do have some similarity to how my cumulus looks close up which is why I just called it that, although rescaling these looked a bit off too, will do more experiments later

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by blackrack

[WarriorSabe]

On 5/10/2022 at 12:50 PM, blackrack said:

There's a bit of that but something else feels off, not sure what. Maybe the lack of shadows, the scale is a bit off and contrast with the planet textures. Either way will do more tests later.

I know I'm a bit late but I think that's about it: the contrast and the sorta uniformish spotty clumpiness it has. I think more variation in the scale of structures would help a lot, as well as perhaps some tweaks to the Scatterer integration to blend a little better (perhaps have a little more of the haze come from higher in the atmo?)

[G'th]

Query: In the future would it be possible to enable the same kind of layer control for citylights that we have for cloud layers?

Having just scale to tweak is kind of disappointing and honestly if I could apply the city light functionality (ie, changes depending on day or night side) while also having more control over it, that would just be swell.

 

[blackrack]

27 minutes ago, G'th said:

Query: In the future would it be possible to enable the same kind of layer control for citylights that we have for cloud layers?

Having just scale to tweak is kind of disappointing and honestly if I could apply the city light functionality (ie, changes depending on day or night side) while also having more control over it, that would just be swell.

I've never really configured city lights or looked into them. Can you describe which functionality you want? As I understand there is a detail texture for daytime and a detail texture for nighttime, but my knowledge stops there. How do you want to use this for clouds?

Edited May 13, 2022 by blackrack

[G'th]

4 hours ago, blackrack said:

I've never really configured city lights or looked into them. Can you describe which functionality you want? As I understand there is a detail texture for daytime and a detail texture for nighttime, but my knowledge stops there. How do you want to use this for clouds?

Well, I don't really want to use it for clouds per say. 

But, what I would want is the ability to apply UV Noise (texture, strength, animation)  as well as allow the detailtex to have a speed setting as the cloud layers do. And if minlight can be applied to just the nightside, that'd also be a neat setting to have. 

What this would basically enable is a more clear cut way of making city lights that...don't suck? lol. City lights currently all hinge on the quality of the textures used, which becomes a problem when it comes to the night side, as the textures can often become unpleasantly distorted when we have to jack up the exposure and colors to get sufficiently bright lights. A working minlight setting in tandem with UV noise would allow a cleaner texture to have the necessary glow, but also a more realistic flicker to the lights. We'd still want to have the day/night detail texture dichotomy, but I think EVE's functions work better for enabling what we have to instead rely on gimp/photoshop skills for. 

But there's also other things this can be used for such as surface features like lava flows, fires, etc that would be particularly bright on the nightside. These are already possible with the current implementation, but the actual control we have over the textures is very limited. 

[blackrack]

Some .webms for your enjoyment (click for better quality)

2 hours ago, G'th said:

Well, I don't really want to use it for clouds per say. 

But, what I would want is the ability to apply UV Noise (texture, strength, animation)  as well as allow the detailtex to have a speed setting as the cloud layers do. And if minlight can be applied to just the nightside, that'd also be a neat setting to have. 

What this would basically enable is a more clear cut way of making city lights that...don't suck? lol. City lights currently all hinge on the quality of the textures used, which becomes a problem when it comes to the night side, as the textures can often become unpleasantly distorted when we have to jack up the exposure and colors to get sufficiently bright lights. A working minlight setting in tandem with UV noise would allow a cleaner texture to have the necessary glow, but also a more realistic flicker to the lights. We'd still want to have the day/night detail texture dichotomy, but I think EVE's functions work better for enabling what we have to instead rely on gimp/photoshop skills for. 

But there's also other things this can be used for such as surface features like lava flows, fires, etc that would be particularly bright on the nightside. These are already possible with the current implementation, but the actual control we have over the textures is very limited. 

I see, I can't promise anything as I want mostly to focus on the clouds but I will keep it mind.

[Horizons Aerospace]

3 hours ago, blackrack said:

Some .webms for your enjoyment (click for better quality)

I see, I can't promise anything as I want mostly to focus on the clouds but I will keep it mind.

Very nice! What plane is that?

[MrPoker]

3 hours ago, blackrack said:

Some .webms for your enjoyment (click for better quality)

I see, I can't promise anything as I want mostly to focus on the clouds but I will keep it mind.

I'm glad I'm born with this and not ksp 2

also you have discord? it's easier to talk than ksp forums

[SpaceCube2000]

43 minutes ago, Horizons Aerospace said:

Very nice! What plane is that?

I think it might be an F-14 Tomcat. A fine plane indeed. 

[R-T-B]

4 hours ago, MrPoker said:

I'm glad I'm born with this and not ksp 2

also you have discord? it's easier to talk than ksp forums

It's not very active, but if you join our Kopernicus discord I know blackrack has a channel dedicated to his mods there (both eve and scatterer).  Here's a join link:

https://discord.gg/WMbmpeHD

[MrPoker]

1 minute ago, R-T-B said:

It's not very active, but if you join our Kopernicus discord I know blackrack has a channel dedicated to his mods there (both eve and scatterer).  Here's a join link:

https://discord.gg/WMbmpeHD

Dead invite link

[R-T-B]

2 minutes ago, MrPoker said:

Dead invite link

oh dear, let me generate a new one.  Lolzers.

https://discord.gg/kWbESYk2rz

PS:  That was in my thread, so thanks people for letting me know it's dead...  for aparently months.  MrPoker, you are a lifesaver, lol.

Edited May 14, 2022 by R-T-B

[blackrack]

6 hours ago, Horizons Aerospace said:

Very nice! What plane is that?

https://kerbalx.com/Raptor9/C7-140-Sea-Skimmer

[Agustin]

Those clouds look insane. When are we having first release? I don't care if its alpha, beta or whatever

[Beetlecat]

14 hours ago, blackrack said:

https://kerbalx.com/Raptor9/C7-140-Sea-Skimmer

Raptor9 never dissapoints.

[MrPoker]

11 hours ago, Agustin said:

Those clouds look insane. When are we having first release? I don't care if its alpha, beta or whatever

I think he will put it in patreon soon