Space Graphics Toolkit & Planets

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Make the space scene of your dreams using Space Graphics Toolkit. This huge collection of space effects can be customized and combined in any way you like, allowing you to quickly make realistic or fantasy worlds.

Space Graphics Toolkit has received regular updates for over 7 years. Thank you to everyone who was purchased, rated, reviewed, and provided feedback so far!

Kickstart your projects with the free media packs you can get from HERE.
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Quickly learn how to use every setting with the step-by-step tutorial scenes.
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Make breathtaking worlds with customizable atmospheres, clouds, dynamic water level, and much more!
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Seamlessly travel from space down to the surface of your planets with procedural terrain generation.
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Explore a 50+ billion lightyear universe with the floating origin system.
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Asteroid belts, atmospheric scattering, galaxies, aurora.
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Accretion discs, black holes, gas giants, volumetric atmosphere.
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The possibilities are endless...
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>> Get Space Graphics Toolkit <<​

Thank you for reading.

 

This looks like some great work. Is there any chance you could add some demo webplayer scenes showing off the features for us to check out? Would definitely encourage people to buy if its as awesome as it sounds

 

Hey congrats on the release.
I noticed you do not mention about a 3D-background effect as in the development thread. Was it cut out?

Btw, I fully support the Quickfingers idea of the demo web player. Please do let know if you need a hand with hosting.

 

I am definitely interested, but want to see a web player demo first and/or video of it in action. Looks good!

 

Thanks. I'll definitely release a demo scene in a day or two. But more importantly, I plan to make some semi-decent videos showing how to use the components to achieve various graphical effects without much hassle.

Nope it's still there, the asset also contains a demo scene that creates a separate scene as a background, and comes with a pdf detailing how to set it up yourself. I didn't realize it was such an important feature to highlight so I didn't mention it here, I'll definitely get around to making a section about this.

Thanks, I'll do both very soon!

 

Sorry, couldn't wait for the demo so I bought it... ;-)

Only problem is now that we have guests round so I can't sit on the computer playing with it!! And I have to go to work early tomorrow (nooOOOOoo!!) So I won't get to play around and marvel at it all until late tomorrow afternoon (GMT.) Will give you feedback ASAP!!

EDIT:

One thing does spring to mind, though, without even testing it - it's a feature request, and I know you've touched upon the subject in the original thread and discounted the idea as it would perhaps be too specific to a certain situation, but it would be absolutely PHENOMENAL if you could include the ability to fly to the surface of the planets and have the surface procedurally generated or something. I'm far from being a competent coder to manage that myself, but could probably tweak my work-in-progress to fit whatever system you came up with...

UPDATE:

Just had a quick flick through the demo scenes - ab-so-lutely frikkin' awesome!!! Not only do the planets and gas giants look realistic, they're beautiful too!! I love the asteroid fields - already I'm thinking of a way to add colliders to the ones that are within a certain range of the camera... I'm sure for performance reasons it'd kill the computer to calculate collisions on them all... ;-)

Can't wait to sit down with this tomorrow and spend some real time looking at how it all works and seeing if I can swap an alien planet from this package into my project.

Love the sunrise/sunset within the atmosphere - but this is CLEARLY demanding some sort of system to allow the player to visit the surface of a planet!!!! That's gotta be top of the priority list for future updates, surely?!

One other thing - and sorry for the lack of technical or astronomy-related jargon - but when viewing a planet with atmosphere from the dark side, so you see the lovely thin orange line of dawn breaking, I think it should be brighter if that makes any sense? Or perhaps could do with just a little more work to make it look spectacular.

Thanks so much for putting this together - I'd say it's worth every penny now, but that would definitely be the case if you add planet surfaces... ;-)

 

OK I added a demo of an alien gas giant scene:

Haha, I guess this isn't one feature I can't reason my way out of adding.

I can fairly easily write (and will over the next few days) a component to tessellate a planet's surface, thus giving you dynamic LOD no matter where on the surface of a planet you're on. But it's kind of a rabbit hole of features, oh well!

Thanks! I also have some ideas on how to make them look even better, but I'll stick to one thing at a time

I will eventually implement this in the pack, the main issue you'll probably come across is that the asteroid positions aren't directly stored in the mesh, so you can't easily find which ones are near the camera. To make this calculation more sensible I'll most likely have to change the way the asteroid generator plots the orbits. But if you find an efficient way to do this with the current setup then let me know.

I think I know what you mean. I just noticed my atmosphere texture blending causes the sunrise/sunsets to just be flat colours, this definitely shouldn't be the case. I'll have it fixed in the next release.

Thanks! Expect an update later in the week

 

A really lovely pack of effects, that I was lucky enough to get to test. Highly recommended. Glad to see it's out!

 

Just picked this up last night and have to say this pack is just awesome. I've been wanting to make a space game for a while and this is exactly what I've been looking for. One question though, I know this is a graphics pack, but is there any possibility you might add a gravity script to it in the future? It would be handy for my ships flying around to to be affected by the planets gravity. But hey, understandable if you don't. And again, amazing pack, I'm certainly going to get a lot of use out of it.

 

Purchased this because well it is very cool and I can see potential in some work I want to do. Question, do you plan to add things like gas clouds and particle effects for when travelling through space and the like. Nothing could be sweeter than being able to see that huge cool looking gas cloud in the distance and then travelling through it etc.

Looking forward to your updates can't wait to see where you take this.

 

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It's not finished yet, but here's a small progress report on the surface LOD component. You can see the planet's surface mesh increase in detail the closer the camera gets to it. The gaps/seams in the terrain are what I'm working on fixing right now.

Thanks! And thanks for helping test it

Thanks! I guess I could add a gravity component. Your ships are physics objects using the rigidbody component right?

Yes, gas clouds are one fairly large feature that's currently absent from this pack and I definitely plan on adding them in the future.

As for the particle effects as you travel through space, I was very close to writing such a component and including it in the initial release. But I decided that I'll freeze my current feature set and actually release the first build as it was already delayed quite a lot. They will definitely be included fairly soon though!

 

The sneak peek is looking good! Can't wait to try it out!

 

Indeed they are, And thank you so much if you do add that in. and love the sneak peak, I'm currently working on recreating our solar system and being able to land ships on mars with better quality planetary surfaces will just be amazing. Also I gotta thank you for the wonderful highres textures in the pack, I only just noticed that they where in the texture folder. My ISS model looks amazing orbiting around earth with those textures (especially as it passes over the night side).​

 

Well, this is certainly up my alley!

Congrats on what looks like a hella wonderful addon for us space game junkies!


Starfields and asteroids make up a large part of my games and anything that give me a leg up on making them look great is a good thing!

-Will

 

Good lord- DarkCoder, if you get that planet detail system working...
Well, it looks AMAZING.

 

Purchased - I had to support this add-on!

Being a Wing Commander junkie, this will definitely help me make my levels look very nice and save me a lot of time with my development.

I hope this project is successful enough for you cause I'd love to see development continue further!


The only thing I'd ask is if possible, please break up the PDF documentation into separate pages; I wanted to print out the Planet and other documentation but it's formatted as one long page of text and images.

Now off to play with some asteroid fields and other stuff!

-Will

 

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This shows Earth from fairly close up, and as you can see I've now fixed the terrain seams with the dynamic LOD. The surface uses a 4096x2048 texture, so each texel represents a region of under 10km (9.7km at the equator).

I mentioned earlier that adding this was going to be a rabbit hole of features, and I'm sure you may be able to see why; While the terrain mesh now looks more detailed up close, the terrain texture doesn't. So if I release it now, I know everyone will request that I add support for detail maps. If I add detail maps, then they would have to only be applied to the land parts of the planet, but then the sea would look boring and flat. Eventually I'll have to separate the land from the sea, but I will leave that for another release.

Thanks! Let me know if/when you post pictures of your project, I'd love to see it

Thanks, and me too! Haha, I didn't think people would actually print it out, but duly noted. I'll split the documentation up for the next release.

 

This keeps getting better and better. With the terrain though, are you allowing it to be modified with the terrain tools also to put foliage and stuff on it? And the ability to flatten it out, etc?
If so I'll buy it right now.

 

I'm pretty sure it's impossible for the terrain tools to interface with any user components. In the future I may write such tools, but the terrain isn't the main focus of this pack, so I don't want to spend all my time on it. Right now, the height is based on a height map texture (of equirectangular projection) that you specify, so you can just draw a solid colour in some area if you want flat terrain. Currently there's no built in method to place objects on the surface, so I'll have to think about that. But it will most likely look different to the way you plot stuff on Unity terrains, because you can have any number of planets, so it would be incredibly inefficient to plot all your trees outside of runtime.

 

Thats understandable. I have thought of a work around already to it. Would be great to just generate great looking planets. Which you already are doing.
Thank you for answering.

Update: Alright.. you sold me on it.. I can see this helping me out. Thanks!

 

Yeah, I have two monitors but I find it easier to sometimes just print it out and read offline.

I started playing around with the star field background, and I was able to figure it out, but hopefully you'll document the rest of this great toolkit as time moves on!

Are there any plans for animated star field effects like seen in Star Trek or the jump to light speed in Star Wars?

I was working on a Shuriken based solution previously but I'd have no problem using something this toolkit provides!


Anyway, great work!

-Will​

 

Indeed, I plan to write more tutorials for each component. As well as video tutorials.

Yeah, I plan to include ways to create Star Wars, Star Trek, and Stargate style FTL effects.

 

^Thanks for the plans on further improvement to the documentation and the consideration for animated star field effects!

Using your toolkit is like having an extra programmer here helping me out with my game which is definitely appreciated!

-Will

 

This looks great ! Looking to buy it soon but I got a question :

I plan on using it more as background stuff, hence I was wondering :

1: What is the poly count for the lowest poly planet mesh that comes with the pack ?

2: Or can we use our own meshes ? I need to be able to make a lowpoly planet (about around 1000 tris).

Thanks!

 

If anyone's wondering why it's taking so long to release an update, it's because this dynamic LOD is a bigger headache than I anticipated it would be. If you use a lot of subdivisions then it's quite easy for the generated mesh to exceed the 65535 vertex limit, so I had to make it so my planet component can handle both single and multiple meshes. Plus, I have to do all of these calculations in a single thread without using up all of the CPU, which is quite the optimization challenge. But it's pretty much done now, once I tidy this code up I'll release an update.

Thanks. Yes, you can specify your own meshes. The lowest detail one I package is 80 triangles, but that's only really useful for tiny moons and stuff.

 

Finally got time to start playing with this.
I imported the asset but I am getting errors which will not allow me to use it -
They seem to be coming from the SGT_CameraFreeOrbit.cs. 'Helper' does not contain a definition for 'Approximately'.
I am using Unity 3.5.5.f3.

Update: Not sure what the heck happened.. but I deleted the project and started again and it's working. Weird.

Alright a little pet peeve here. I am printing out the pdf. But why aren't they seperated into pages? The Ring Shadows is one page, while the Creating a Basic Planet is another huge page. Makes it kinda tough to print them like that.

 

Thanks for the update, can't wait to mess around with this new feature. Should be fun once I finish my landing scripts so I can fly to the moon and land (assuming I don’t crash my ship ha). But hey no rush, take your time, still have plenty to play with in the packs current state to keep occupied. Especially since I realized some things could be used for more than just space games. I’ve been working on a horror game for a while and realized the other night that the star field part of this pack would make for an amazing dynamic night skybox. So now I have twinkling stars in the night sky which really adds to the game. check out the pic http://i.imgur.com/EiZVB.jpg

oh and you said you wanted to see my space station in orbit so here is a pic of that too http://i.imgur.com/HXJcj.jpg

Which I do have one comment on that pic. As you can see it has a camera flare on the sun to add a nice effect, And I have some issues with that. Specifically the sun flare would actually show through the planet. I found a solution of just putting a sphere game object inside my planet that was the same size, which is easy enough, and that stopped the flare from shinning through the earth. But it was strange and figured I should mention it if you hadn't noticed that.

 

Looks great!

For the lens flares to hide behind the planet, you just need to add a Sphere Collider component to your planet (Component > Physics > Sphere Collider), then set the radius value to whatever your planet's radius is set to. For the next version of SGT I've added a toggle value to the Planet and Star components that will automatically create a Mesh Collider.

 

Wow, can't believe I didn't think of that. Oh well just took a round about way of doing it with putting a sphere inside. But hey now I know and thanks for that (and the future toggle for when I make the rest of my planets).

 

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I've now completed the surface LOD component. It was very tricky getting it to run smoothly, but after many many many hours of head scratching, I've managed to do it. I also wrote a surface LOD collider component, which will generate MeshColliders for your dynamic LOD planets.

The planet component has a few new features too: It now supports detail textures, so your planets will look better up close. And it now supports cubemap textures alongside the current cylindrical (equirectangular) textures, this means the poles of your planets/stars can be free from polar distortion.

I've also created a Gravity Source, and a Gravity Receiver component. These allow physics objects to properly orbit your planet, and for things on the surface to fall down.

This update also fixes a variety of other issues. Once I've updated the documentation and checked everything else, I'll release it!

 

That looks fantastic. Can't wait to start working with it.

 

loving the sneak peek, should be fun to check out the new features. I can't wait to mess with the surface LOD stuff, and I of course must personally thank you for the gravity source since I was the one who asked for it. It'll be fun to see how it affects my landing scripts ... I'm probably going to crash more lol.

 

I bought it !

Its very nice and well done.

However, what would be really useful is having a way to have nebulas (either volumetric looking or non-volumetric for background use ) and placing them around the sphere for use as background objects. I think that's what is really missing in this pack. So far, to have nice nebulas I put them in the skysphere texture.

So while the starfield is high-res, animated (really cool by the way ) and allows to use less memory by batching the stars, I'm still stuck using a high res texture for the skysphere so I can have nice-looking nebulas in the background. But don't get me wrong, other than that, this pack is amazing. Great job !

 

Looking great! Can't wait for the update - any idea when you'll be releasing it?

 

I will absolutely include this in a future update, but making a fully 3D nebula that both looks good and doesn't have too much overhead is incredibly challenging and will take me a long time to implement. Once I'm happy with the current features I'll begin adding new ones.

I shouldn't say any specific dates, so I won't. But I'm going to rewrite the documentation and create some new scenes, so probably over a week. It will be worth the wait though

 

Woah! I've bought a few assets on the asset store for their potential, but most of them just fizzle out. This, however, looks like you're really putting in a heap of effort. I've always wanted planets I can land on and fly to procedurally. No others have managed (to my knowledge) to work out the ocean or terrain features like trees. You can though, I'm sure, just seeing how this asset has progressed has me hooked. Another purchase confirmed.

 

Darkcoder, are you planning on update the price with each release?

 

Thanks, no pressure eh!

Not with each release, but as the feature list expands, you should expect the price to follow suit.

While the coming update will add new features, it also fixes things I overlooked in the initial release, so I don't think it's fair to increase the price just yet.

 

Wow. I purchased this yesterday and the quality and performance of these components is great.

Where do I ask support questions for the components? I using the starfield and skysphere components in a background layer, and while I can get the starfield to work fine I can't get the Skysphere visible in the Game View. It appears in the Scene View as a giant purple ball encasing everything. It was copied from the AsteroidVortex scene and the Mesh set to InvSphere64 and is in the background layer.

EDIT:
Never mind, I fixed it. For some reason the copy and paste between scenes stopped it working. I deleted it then created a new GameObject and attached the script and it worked, even though all settings were the same.

 

Check the bottom of Readme.pdf on how to contact me.

I just tried the copy + paste between scenes, and it seems that the script references to the child GameObjects are lost. This may be due to a bug in my code, so I'll investigate it later. Thanks for pointing it out, I didn't even know you could copy and paste objects!

 

Let's say I want to work on something procedural with your toolkit. Can the stars/planets/etc. be instantiated completely from code? If not, instantiated from prefab and modified in some fashion? If not, can any of the knobs be turned at runtime?

Thanks

 

Second that question thanks . Was thinking exactly the same thing. Especially if procedural noise is an option for planet textures / relief.

 

Yes, all aspects of this toolkit can be created via code. The process is pretty much just: Create an empty GameObject, attach a component from this toolkit, then set some values in this component for how you want it to look. However, there is currently no support for prefabs, but I will try and fix this for the next release because I realize it's very important for many people's project workflows.

The next release will feature examples of procedurally creating a scene with stars, planets, orbits, etc. As well as modifying planets and such that are already contained in the scene.

There is currently no option for procedural noise on any of the texures, but it's easy enough to add for the terrain height lookup.

 

I have a ? for everyone using this which I am having a little issue is getting more textures. I have followed the links from you Darkcoder which is great but I want more. I have played with ones from NASA for the skysphere but I am looking for planet textures to use.
If you don't mind sharing, were are you all getting yours from or are you just sticking with the ones from the asset?

 

Not sure what you're using to edit your PDFs but I can vouch for and highly recommend Serif PagePlus x6 for any kinds of desktop or ebook publishing - very easy to use, great integrated help system and inexpensive compared to all the others:
http://www.serif.com/pageplus/

Looking forward to your updates!

-Will

 

This really looks like a very nice tool kit. What scale are the planets compared to real ones?

 

The scale is what you want to make it. You are controlling the size based on the radius of the sphere.

 

This looks incredibly awesome, I need pretty much exactly this, however I have one question: Do we get the source code or is it compiled into a .dll? This is rather important as I will most likely use this as a base to build upon, and will most likely want to modify a lot of pieces.

Also the texturing of the planets, is it a cube map or normal uv textured sphere?

 

You get all the scripts.

 

Also, the atmosphere scattering, is it using this: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter16.html or some other method?