[1.1.2][1-1-2] May 13-2016 EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements

[Galileo]

13 minutes ago, rbray89 said:

Seriously, do people not even just glance at the OP?

Wait,  there's an OP?

[gamerscircle]

1 hour ago, rbray89 said:

This is something I'd really like to do, but it is a VERY difficult problem. I've yet to see a planet in ANY game or simulator that makes nice procedural clouds. They seem to use perlin noise exclusively.

Send logs. Seriously, do people not even just glance at the OP?

I did read that and I thought perhaps I was just doing something wrong vs a mod conflict or a mod issue.  Someone asked in my stream why they were not getting clouds when installing EVE and I took a vanilla KSP install and installed EVE and got no clouds either.  I can follow up with a log.

[Proot]

@rbray89 I want to rebuild an effect, but I can't find the way again...  The thing is I want to stack two layers, at different hights, moving at the same time and in the same way.
How I should do that?

[rbray89]

10 minutes ago, gamerscircle said:

I did read that and I thought perhaps I was just doing something wrong vs a mod conflict or a mod issue.  Someone asked in my stream why they were not getting clouds when installing EVE and I took a vanilla KSP install and installed EVE and got no clouds either.  I can follow up with a log.

The issue is I can't tell you what the problem is without the logs... It could be almost ANYTHING. Logs are really the only window I have into the operation of individual installs. Glad to see you read the OP. Is there anything I could do to enforce people to post logs with their issues? I know I said I wouldn't respond, but that seems like It would just result in the community having to tell them to read the OP instead of me

2 minutes ago, Proot said:

@rbray89 I want to rebuild an effect, but I can't find the way again...  The thing is I want to stack two layers, at different hights, moving at the same time and in the same way.
How I should do that?

Synchronizing different heights is hard, as the speed is not rotationally based, it is based off of speed at cloud level. eg. couds moving at the "same speed" at different heights wouldn't be synchronized. I'd have to edit things in code for this to be feasable. 

[tsaven]

I am not using EVE yet as I am waiting for the 1.1.2 update, but I used it prior in 1.0.5.  It's beautiful!

According to the above post, it seems like multiple cloud layers are possible.  How would I go about enabling this on Kerbin?  Can I set the transparency levels, to give some kind of thin, wispy  clouds up near 15k?  Or even a few different layers, but each not as dense?  The stock single layer is often pretty solid so I worry that if I took that same mask, and just copied it to a few different altitudes, even with the differences in rotational speeds it would be almost permanently overcast.

This is an amazing mod and a bit sad that the stock game doesn't include it!

[Poodmund]

14 minutes ago, Proot said:

@rbray89 I want to rebuild an effect, but I can't find the way again...  The thing is I want to stack two layers, at different hights, moving at the same time and in the same way.
How I should do that?

Circular motion mathematics to calculate the ratio of the speed value at which the lower layer must use compared the the speed value of the higher layer that should be in relation to the difference in altitude specified?

[Blacks]

@rbray89 few question if is posible:

- thickness of cloud is influence by _DetailsScale value + Layer Volume size + Area ?
- fade or distance were cloud are seen, render are define by _DetailDist, _DistFade ?
- is it a way to make cloud to be less grid & be more random spread up, down, in all direction ? see picture, i was try to combine 3 layer at close altitude (2000, 2400, 2800) with diferite value but impact on fps is huge

Cheers

[Proot]

48 minutes ago, rbray89 said:

The issue is I can't tell you what the problem is without the logs... It could be almost ANYTHING. Logs are really the only window I have into the operation of individual installs. Glad to see you read the OP. Is there anything I could do to enforce people to post logs with their issues? I know I said I wouldn't respond, but that seems like It would just result in the community having to tell them to read the OP instead of me

Synchronizing different heights is hard, as the speed is not rotationally based, it is based off of speed at cloud level. eg. couds moving at the "same speed" at different heights wouldn't be synchronized. I'd have to edit things in code for this to be feasable. 

Not very long ago, I was able to do this without difficulty... I hate when I don't save some findings... so dumb from me.
An option to chaining together two or more layers would be great, but don't worry at all  about this if it's not in your plans.

[rbray89]

26 minutes ago, Blacks said:

@rbray89 few question if is posible:

- thickness of cloud is influence by _DetailsScale value + Layer Volume size + Area ?
- fade or distance were cloud are seen, render are define by _DetailDist, _DistFade ?
- is it a way to make cloud to be less grid & be more random spread up, down, in all direction ? see picture, i was try to combine 3 layer at close altitude (2000, 2400, 2800) with diferite value but impact on fps is huge

Cheers

Thickness is determined by the size param. Area covered is determined by the area param. 
Fade is determined by the _DetailDist and _DistFade.

Use noiseScale to change the noise params to change the determined values through the perlin noise. You can also use the maxTranslation values and add room to move in X and Z to make it less grid like.

[larkvi]

I seem to have city lights on Minmus? It doesn't look like I am seeing the Kerbin lights through Minmus, but I could be wrong. I am using a lot of mods, so it is possible that another might be at fault, bit I am not sure how to easily locate this spot in a clean save.

http://imgur.com/a/mrHVY

Logfile: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2n18g977atxrjxs/MinCityLights.log?dl=0

Edit: (I actually thought I had found a cool anomaly--consider making Minmus ruins on purpose as an easter egg.)

Edited May 9, 2016 by larkvi

[MrKernel]

31 minutes ago, larkvi said:

I seem to have city lights on Minmus? It doesn't look like I am seeing the Kerbin lights through Minmus, but I could be wrong. I am using a lot of mods, so it is possible that another might be at fault, bit I am not sure how to easily locate this spot in a clean save.

http://imgur.com/a/mrHVY

Logfile: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2n18g977atxrjxs/MinCityLights.log?dl=0

Edit: (I actually thought I had found a cool anomaly--consider making Minmus ruins on purpose as an easter egg.)

I have the same symptoms as you.

Doctor?

[larkvi]

11 minutes ago, MrKernel said:

I have the same symptoms as you.

What mods are you using? I want to see what can be ruled out.

[Tekener]

1 hour ago, larkvi said:

I seem to have city lights on Minmus? It doesn't look like I am seeing the Kerbin lights through Minmus, but I could be wrong. I am using a lot of mods, so it is possible that another might be at fault, bit I am not sure how to easily locate this spot in a clean save.

http://imgur.com/a/mrHVY

Logfile: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2n18g977atxrjxs/MinCityLights.log?dl=0

Edit: (I actually thought I had found a cool anomaly--consider making Minmus ruins on purpose as an easter egg.)

Same here, wasn't able to narrow the effect down, but only graphic mods I use are EVE, scatterer and TextureReplacer. EVE and scatterer using default settings, TextureReplacer is only using a different skybox.

[MrKernel]

Here's my mod list:

Although I have not visited Minmus since the last EVE update. Will try now.

[Kepler68]

I see in the OP you need a log to help people yet I have been unable to find the output.log or the player.log, just the ksp log which I heard dosent help. Can someone give me the path to the useful log

[Waz]

I'm working on procedural nebula in an unrelated project, and one thing I have to deal with is the camera getting extremely close to the nebula without it looking pixelated. I was looking at the clouds in EVE (SVE actually, with the 1500x1500 pixel textures) and pixelation is very obvious, so I thought I'd mention how I avoid it.

Basically, I perturb the finest detail of the UV co-ordinates such that at around the resolution of 1-2 pixels of the source texture, the fractional part below this is used to look up a noise texture and perturb the UVs slightly.

In pictures...

From a distance, up close without perturbation, and up close with perturbation:

As you can see, without the perturbation, the pixels show up at these extreme magnifications, but with perturbation, they disappear into cloudy detail. And you can keep on zooming in way more than this.

Now SVE with 1500x1500 pixel cloud detail:

I hope you can see what I found familiar!

The change is pretty small. I use ShaderForge for my shaders, but it's basically just doing a mod/fmod of the UVs by a small number (0.01), scaling back to 0..1 (x100), looking up a red-green noise texture suitable for clouds, scaling that vector to be very small (0.001) and adding it to the UV before looking up the actual cloud texture. Net result is to add noise at the lowest detail where otherwise we'd see the ugly edges of pixels.

I suspect lower resolution images could be used for clouds if the finest detail could be provided as a UV noise texture.

If this is already possible, I'd love to work on some UV noise textures for EVE. Alternatively, if this is a Kopernicus thing, send me there.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Waz

[rbray89]

3 hours ago, Kepler68 said:

I see in the OP you need a log to help people yet I have been unable to find the output.log or the player.log, just the ksp log which I heard dosent help. Can someone give me the path to the useful log

KSP.log is useful, it is player.log that isn't really helpful.

[rbray89]

2 hours ago, Waz said:

I'm working on procedural nebula in an unrelated project, and one thing I have to deal with is the camera getting extremely close to the nebula without it looking pixelated. I was looking at the clouds in EVE (SVE actually, with the 1500x1500 pixel textures) and pixelation is very obvious, so I thought I'd mention how I avoid it.

Basically, I perturb the finest detail of the UV co-ordinates such that at around the resolution of 1-2 pixels of the source texture, the fractional part below this is used to look up a noise texture and perturb the UVs slightly.

In pictures...

From a distance, up close without perturbation, and up close with perturbation:

As you can see, without the perturbation, the pixels show up at these extreme magnifications, but with perturbation, they disappear into cloudy detail. And you can keep on zooming in way more than this.

Now SVE with 1500x1500 pixel cloud detail:

I hope you can see what I found familiar!

The change is pretty small. I use ShaderForge for my shaders, but it's basically just doing a mod/fmod of the UVs by a small number (0.01), scaling back to 0..1 (x100), looking up a red-green noise texture suitable for clouds, scaling that vector to be very small (0.001) and adding it to the UV before looking up the actual cloud texture. Net result is to add noise at the lowest detail where otherwise we'd see the ugly edges of pixels.

I suspect lower resolution images could be used for clouds if the finest detail could be provided as a UV noise texture.

If this is already possible, I'd love to work on some UV noise textures for EVE. Alternatively, if this is a Kopernicus thing, send me there.

Oh, now that's clever. 

I actually have a perlin noise generator that I use for the volumetric particles that I could re-use for the clouds. A texture would likely work fine as well though. Is there a good way to make sure it only samples from a distance of 1 pixel away regardless of texture resolution? Or does that not matter? I guess one could always pass in texture size.

Currently there is the "Detail" texture, but as it stands it is very easy to spot, as it is just a repeated texture that is masked with the cloud overlay. By manipulating the UV, the pattern should be almost invisible though I think. 

[Dimon]

Because of what may be such problems? The settings are made correctly , but at an altitude of about 180 km. circles appear on the surface. If you remove the cube Jool texture, the circles disappear

 

[Proot]

1 hour ago, Dimon said:

Because of what may be such problems? The settings are made correctly , but at an altitude of about 180 km. circles appear on the surface. If you remove the cube Jool texture, the circles disappear

Clouds are clipping with "terrain". Try to rise the main cloud texture, this issue happens at Jool when texture is too near from the "surface".

[GarrisonChisholm]

Good afternoon.  I just have a simple question, as I have started using CKAN but note that EVE does not seem to be included.  Is this just because of the 1.1.2 update, or is EVE not hosted-on/accessible-via CKAN?

Edited May 10, 2016 by GarrisonChisholm

[Waz]

6 hours ago, rbray89 said:

I actually have a perlin noise generator that I use for the volumetric particles that I could re-use for the clouds. A texture would likely work fine as well though. Is there a good way to make sure it only samples from a distance of 1 pixel away regardless of texture resolution? Or does that not matter? I guess one could always pass in texture size.

Currently there is the "Detail" texture, but as it stands it is very easy to spot, as it is just a repeated texture that is masked with the cloud overlay. By manipulating the UV, the pattern should be almost invisible though I think. 

A detail texture is exactly what I tried first too, but it either became too visible when zoomed out, or wasn't high enough detail to stop pixels appearing when zoomed in. The scales I'm dealing with with my nebulae are just too extreme - just as the clouds in eve have to deal with a ship floating a few kilometers or a few tens of thousands of kilometers away.

I've found that the noise texture isn't detectable visually - I guess because it's varying something that's already non-repeating. The advantage of a texture is of course that you can try different "flavours" of noise easily to see which suits which planet, and other people can easily change them.

It doesn't need to be forced to 1 pixel away, but of course if it's too far then it just chews up the detail that's there. So I'd expect that anyone wanting to replace the textures with higher (or lower) resolution ones would also want to tweak the size of the factional part of the UV used and the scale of the UV perturbations (and the noise texture) to suit the quality of the texture.

I've only just started looking at it, but by offsetting the noise sampling by time, you get a pretty cool animation. Not useful for nebulae, but intriguing for clouds.

Edit: quick crappy demo of animating the fine detail:

 

Edited May 11, 2016 by Waz
video

[Galileo]

On ‎5‎/‎8‎/‎2016 at 5:49 PM, Tekener said:

Oh, thought you wanted them. So if you made some for yourself, how about offering your Dune Duststorms to the community instead of just posting pics about it?

I made my dust storms available in my mod. If you want it for stock let me know, I can throw it together for you OR go check out SSRSS.

[Proot]

@Waz, that is very clever, and the demo looks damm good.

[Waz]

5 hours ago, Proot said:

@Waz, that is very clever, and the demo looks damm good.

Thanks - I was worried it was too subtle to be easily appreciated.