New galaxy model, full of stars !

[Cham]

Here's a - fictious - ring shaped galaxy with arms, full of dust and Orion-like nebulae. The stars are mainly concentrated in the arms (the stars distribution fits the nebula model). It's not finished yet, but the rendering is already great.

[Cham]

More views, with Magn pushed to the max :

A view from the inside :

I'm not sure yet of what to do, for the central core. Maybe a simple yellowish blob full of stars...

[bh]

That's impressive! FPS?

[Cham]

FPS?

Well, on my 2009 Mac mini, it's a bit slow (it depends on the view. About 10 to 15 FPS in the worst case). On my 2010 13" MacBook Pro, it's much higher.

[bh]

That's super... prob too much for my mini... it's a 2006 and it's a bit tired. I get around 5FPS in Earth orbit!

[Cham]

Two more views from the inside (Magnitude isn't pushed to the max here). It's really fun to move inside this thing, especially when you slip in/out of the arms.

[Cham]

More stars...

There's a total of 90 000 stars in the ring galaxy (60 000 Main Sequence stars + 30 000 higher luminosity classes). The view is superb in Celestia, and the frame rate is pretty high, despite the scene complexity.

Super massive black hole in the middle. A central bulge is yet to come with a nebula.

[Cham]

There's a young star field in there !

On average, the distance between adjacent stars in this galaxy is roughly 100 LY.

[Reiko]

This is fantastic! I can not wait to see the finished product.

[Cham]

This is my source of inspiration for that annular galaxy :

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020909.html

[Cham]

I'm adding more details and colors. The frame rate is decreasing a bit, but it's still fine on my 2009 Mac mini.

Some views to compare with the pictures posted above (click the images below for a large 1680 X 1050 view) :















If only Chris was implementing the bug fix I was asking since a long time, about the nebulae sprites rendering at very large distance (white dots)... This would allow a massive production of sprites based nebulae in Celestia !

[Cham]

I made the ring galaxy as a multi-layers object that can be toggled with a CELX script. This way, we can have several rendering of the same galaxy.

Here's the default representation, using a 256 X 256 custom PNG template (default rendering style in Celestia) :

RingUniverse.png (57.71 KiB) Viewed 3162 times

Unfortunately, this template needs to be placed in the base models folder, and isn't recognised by Celestia if it's placed in the extras folder.

Here's a preview of the default rendering in Celestia. The arms fits perfectly well with the stars distribution :

Here's the default template superposed with a part of the sprites model (the other part isn't shown here since we can't show more than three pictures in a message, and I'm too lazy to use my personnal server space ) :

I didn't made the central core yet.

[Cham]

I added the galactic core :

EDIT : I released the addon there (download link) :

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=16649&p=128069#p128069