Star Flares

[CelestiaProject]

In this topic Chris developed diffractive refraction effect, which occurs when watching the stars through a variety of optical instruments (telescopes, binoculars, etc.)

Unfortunately, Chris has not completed the effect, so it is not the repository.

[375gnu]

I had a short email conversation with Chris and he suggested another, faster and simpler, implementation.

• The texture has just a single 16-bit floating point channel; color is not "baked in" to the texture
• The contents of the texture are multiplied by a value determined by the magnitude of the star
• For the sake of performance, it's critical that the shader reduces the size of the point for fainter stars
• Probably the toughest part is designing the texture. The center is a Moffat distribution; the halos are based on actual astrophotos

So technically this looks like "scaled disks" but with some adjustments.

[SevenSpheres]

Any progress on this?

[375gnu]

nope :)

[SevenSpheres]

@Askaniy, are you able to make this texture?

[375gnu]

Such texture should be generated programmatically. I have a algorithm description and example of such texture but without halo, we agreed that galo is not needed as it's just an artifact.

[SevenSpheres]

I have a algorithm description and example of such texture

So there is progress then! :-)

[SevenSpheres]

Celestia EP v3.0 has been recovered.

[SevenSpheres]

Is the development team aware of the old Celestia build from here ("svn5063 (+fading orbits, +new star rendering)")? It implements a similar star rendering to the EP one, but without diffraction spikes and apparently without artifacts around very bright stars. Screenshots here.

[375gnu]

Our buggy branch is based on the same basically code.

[SevenSpheres]

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