Development #4 | Atmospheric Scattering

Hey everyone!
Like always thank you for tuning in. Before I continue I like to encourage you to see the video first! :)

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So in this week's development I worked on the planet a bit more.  I have updated the textures to be determined on the height of the vertex. One problem that this causes is when it transitions to a different texture. Because I didn't blend in the neighboring textures it just looked weird so what I did to fix that was to add a blend weigh factor and with that it looks so much better. I didn't show it in this video but I will show it you on the next one. Anyway, I also fixed a lighting issue that I mentioned in the previous video.

The big thing I worked on this week was atmospheric scattering. It was a bit of pain since I have not done it before. I had to look at a lot of articles. I had some awesome things that wasn't my intention and I did show it on the video. Here are some screenshots:

Of course those are not correct but eventually I was able to make it work a bit better and I am so excited. I was close to giving up on it but I am glad I didn't. It looks beautiful so far. I need to tweak it a bit more but hopefully I have it done by next week.

Well that's about it. Hope you enjoyed it and like always feel free for any feedback and suggestions to this blog or in the video. Thanks for tuning in and see you on the next one. :)

Development #3

Hey everyone!

This development ended up taking me 2 weeks and it still not even done yet. I didn't want to post a video yet but since its been a while and I had something to show so why not.
So before I continue, if you haven't seen it I would love for you to watch the development video first! :)
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So in this development I ended working on Tessellation. More specifically on Planet Tessellation.  I actually didn't even know that OpenGL had Tessellation shaders for this and I got so excited to start learning about this. At first I ended up working on a cube that by normalizing the points it ends up becoming a sphere. It kind of did work but the edges/corners didn't correctly match since some of them were higher than others. I couldn't figure out how to fix that so decided to look on some other solution. I might just come back to it once I can get a grasp of Tessellation a bit more. I did love this cube sphere thing because I love the way it added quads when updating the LOD. The quads/triangles didn't magically appeared out of nowhere like the next object I discovered which is the Icosahedron.

With the Icosahedron I was able to make it work better and the edges matched perfectly. The only thing I don't like about this is that as the LOD gets updated, triangles pop out of nowhere. I will keep looking more into it if I can fixed that because the cube sphere didn't do that. Anyway, after that I started implementing the noise and height maps in order to create terrains around the planet. So far I like the height maps better but I will keep messing around with the noise so I can get something cool out of it. Once terrain was generated from the height map, depending on how high the vertex is I set it to be either terrain or the ocean. It started to look better with that so I started adding textures for it. I need better textures and also to be able to blend them correctly between two textures as well but other than that it look pretty good.

I am happy where I am at but I still have a long way to go to make it look beautiful.
Thanks again for reading the blog. Like always if you have any suggestions or feedback on anything please let me know! Stay tune for the next development blog :)