camouflage
gaslit at scale.
I guess even that giant-glowing-brain star just looks like a bright dot from a planet anyway. Or like... y'know, the sun.
Space Engine
- Thread starter camouflage
- Start date
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Damn, how do you get your screenshots to look so nice? Mine look like shit by comparison.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
There is a "go to surface" option in Celestia. Ctrl-G. The ground itself usually looks like a featureless flat plane, unless you have some hefty detail textures installed for the body in question, or land in/near a model. But it's good for looking up into the sky.
As for getting a good view from the ground of the local star in Space Engine, I find the best places to look for those kind of views are in red dwarf star systems, since habitable/interesting-looking planets will orbit close to the stellar primary.
Here's an example:
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
sigh. i wish our sun looked like a giant-glowing-brain.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
sigh. i wish our sun looked like a giant-glowing-brain.
Just wait five billion years, you'll get your wish.
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
Skillz.
j/k
2 things in particular, beyond being careful with composition:
1) ReShade - this is a tool that lets you apply your own shaders to more or less any game out there. There are a bunch of shaders available for it, and you can modify them to create something pretty. I've created a preset for Space Engine, and I change elements of it depending on the colour of whatever planet I'm taking pictures of, to enhance, alter entirely, or whatever. It's all done in-game, no post-processing in photoshop or similar. If you use ReShade, you have to use ReShade's own screenshot function, because Space Engine's (or most other games') won't capture the shader information, so it'll look like a vanilla scene instead.
2) SRWE - this lets you 'hotsample' in various games (coverage is patchy, but there are other tools that do similar, or enable proper downsampling, if any given game won't play ball). What that means is that I run Space Engine in windowed mode, I select Space Engine from the list of applications in SRWE, and then I can imput the resolution and aspect ratio that I want SRWE to render Space Engine in. So, I can set up a shot at 1440 x 1440 for my 1:1 square shots, and when I have it aligned nicely I can momentarily change the resolution in SRWE to 3000 x 3000 and take a high resolution shot, then change it back to 1440 x 1440. The resulting screenshot will be 3000 x 3000, which when displayed on a regular 1080p or 1440p monitor will look better than if shot at 1080 or 1440. It's a really good method of AA (effectively manual super-sampling), but it also enhances depth, shadows, colours, etc because there are far many more pixels being rendered, meaning the final picture simply has more information at its disposal.
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
Red dwarfs aren't the only stars that will have planets close by. Anything near the centre of a galaxy or in a smallish nebula can have them. Red dwarfs, red (super)giants, yellow giants like the pic below:
Generally if you get really close to the centre of a galaxy you'll find plenty. How interesting the planets will be varies of course. It might well be that red dwarfs have more interesting topography. But of course, there's always the editor.
Generally if you get really close to the centre of a galaxy you'll find plenty. How interesting the planets will be varies of course. It might well be that red dwarfs have more interesting topography. But of course, there's always the editor.
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
An example of what ReShade can do: 3 pictures of Sirius B, no post-processing; all rendered in-game.
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
For comparison, the bottom shot at 1400 x 1400 (resized for upload), and no ReShade:
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
Another:
alsoknownas
some bloke
This would be awesome on Oculus Rift.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I just downloaded and installed the latest stable version (v0.972 I think?), and hey, music! Spacey ambient stuff. Very fitting. I tried searching to see if there was more music that could be added, but so far I've turned up nothing. That said, I highly recommend listening to the album Lifeforms by Future Sound of London while using this program (it was a favourite back when I only knew of Celestia).
It seems to run a bit faster and look more polished as well. Very well done. Still looks better when you turn off the diffraction spikes.
edit: SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
It seems to run a bit faster and look more polished as well. Very well done. Still looks better when you turn off the diffraction spikes.
edit: SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
Last edited:
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
Having a little pootle around in this again at the moment.
Discovered you can take super hi-res screenshots without the need for SRWE (although SRWE is easier so that's what I'm using), by just changing the windowed resolution under Display (shift+F8). It's a bit fiddly, but you can change aspect ratio as well. Thought I'd mention it in case anyone finds the perfect system they want to take a picture of and potentially print at any point - the larger the better for print.
The game can still be temperamental depending on your hardware. Seems to differ from person to person, and isn't necessarily more stable the better your PC. I start to get unstable if I hotsample while on the surface of planets, but it's okay more or less if I'm just in space. I'm hotsampling to ~8k atm and it's fine.
This is 8648x3392 2.55:1 (not using ReShade at the moment, it's more stable without it, so this is in-game colours):
Discovered you can take super hi-res screenshots without the need for SRWE (although SRWE is easier so that's what I'm using), by just changing the windowed resolution under Display (shift+F8). It's a bit fiddly, but you can change aspect ratio as well. Thought I'd mention it in case anyone finds the perfect system they want to take a picture of and potentially print at any point - the larger the better for print.
The game can still be temperamental depending on your hardware. Seems to differ from person to person, and isn't necessarily more stable the better your PC. I start to get unstable if I hotsample while on the surface of planets, but it's okay more or less if I'm just in space. I'm hotsampling to ~8k atm and it's fine.
This is 8648x3392 2.55:1 (not using ReShade at the moment, it's more stable without it, so this is in-game colours):
Vintage Paw
dead stare and computer glare
This is bonkers.
RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B2 (planet in the foreground), in orbit around a white dwarf, which is part of a binary star system with a red hypergiant.
So here is the second planet in the white dwarf’s system (foreground). On the left you can see the closest planet (with the tail).
Right ahead of us is RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 A, the red hypergiant -- one of the stars from this binary system (which has its own system of planets). The white, flat disc to its left is RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B, the white dwarf (that these two planets orbit). The red hypergiant is far, far further away than the white dwarf: From this planet, the white dwarf is 0.20 AU away, and the red hypergiant is 85.05 AU away.
I’d only seen the white dwarf and her planets, until I turned the camera around and BOOM! there was the red hypergiant. I’ve fooled around in Space Engine enough to know that scale is impossible to comprehend, but this blew me away.
Two pictures of RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B1, the planet on the left with the tail:
Super-massive png versions available at flickr.
RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B2 (planet in the foreground), in orbit around a white dwarf, which is part of a binary star system with a red hypergiant.
So here is the second planet in the white dwarf’s system (foreground). On the left you can see the closest planet (with the tail).
Right ahead of us is RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 A, the red hypergiant -- one of the stars from this binary system (which has its own system of planets). The white, flat disc to its left is RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B, the white dwarf (that these two planets orbit). The red hypergiant is far, far further away than the white dwarf: From this planet, the white dwarf is 0.20 AU away, and the red hypergiant is 85.05 AU away.
I’d only seen the white dwarf and her planets, until I turned the camera around and BOOM! there was the red hypergiant. I’ve fooled around in Space Engine enough to know that scale is impossible to comprehend, but this blew me away.
Two pictures of RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B1, the planet on the left with the tail:
Super-massive png versions available at flickr.
Steel Icarus
we move
I just got this - for the first time since buying Elite Dangerous at the end of March last year I've not felt like logging onto ED today but space, as Frank Sidebottom always reminded us, is ace.
Feels like I've only begun to scratch the surface - I've visited some obvious places like a few nebulae and well-known stars and bodies in our solar system - but I'm a bit lost as to what to do next. Would love to check out some planet surfaces...
Feels like I've only begun to scratch the surface - I've visited some obvious places like a few nebulae and well-known stars and bodies in our solar system - but I'm a bit lost as to what to do next. Would love to check out some planet surfaces...
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
This here for example is the third planet orbiting the white dwarf star RS 8474-1385-8-11859833-640.
1.2 times Earth's surface gravity, 0.185 Earth atmospheres of pressure at sea level. Not an ideal candidate for a new home, even before we consider the high levels of toxic sulfur dioxide in an anoxic atmosphere - but hey, it has a solar day of 23 hours and 28 minutes! That alone could make it worth something for those with the patience or resources to terraform.
Here's a nice view I took from the surface. Good spot for a habitat I reckon.
1.2 times Earth's surface gravity, 0.185 Earth atmospheres of pressure at sea level. Not an ideal candidate for a new home, even before we consider the high levels of toxic sulfur dioxide in an anoxic atmosphere - but hey, it has a solar day of 23 hours and 28 minutes! That alone could make it worth something for those with the patience or resources to terraform.
Here's a nice view I took from the surface. Good spot for a habitat I reckon.
