Space Graphics Toolkit & Planets

Sure, send me a PM or email (listed in Read Me.pdf) and I can check it out.

I have no idea if any ocean asset is compatible with SGT though.

 

I love the features of this asset. I'm trying to make a 'to-scale' game of solar systems. I have positions and such all sorted but currently I scale up the planets massively (a standard sphere is usually anywhere between 500 - 3000xyz scale for terrestrial planets, and upwards of 40000xyz for Jovian planets).

Will this asset be able to handle these scales/sizes (most notably, the terrestrial ones where players can land/walk around on them) in terms of textures etc.

ALso with the planet/terrain features, does this asset come with procedural heightmap generation - as in it makes it's own terrains, or does it have to be supplied with one (either way is fine with me, in fact the latter will likely be easier as it wouldn't make sense to enter a star system and Planet X has 3 mountains, come back 10 minutes later and suddenly it has 7 mountains haha) but it'd be great to know so I can consider this when working out what else I'd need to do

Finally, the stars are also extremely large objects in terms of scale (300,000+ etc) do the stars created with this toolkit handle these sizes also, or will I need to implement some sort of scale-by-distance custom script (which I was considering doing anyway haha)


Edit: Also just to check, does the planet-side stuff also generate oceans/water (or will I need an additional asset for this?)

I'd also like to be able to deform the terrain, such as impact craters, digging etc. Is this possible?

 

SGT can handle 1:1 scale scenes IF you implement an origin shifting system and multiple camera (for different scales) system. Out of the box all SGT features act similar to normal GameObjects that can be positioned using the Transform component, which obviously won't work properly with positions in the millions of units due to floating precision issues.

However, planets will not look good up close (e.g. walking on planet distance) using a 1:1 scale, because the dynamic LOD system isn't designed for this much detail, nor is the procedural generation, nor are the surface shaders.

SGT does come with procedural noise and terrain object spawning components, but they are basic and just implement straight Simplex noise you can stack into FbM. If you need multiple biomes then you'll have to modify or make additional procedural height components.

Stars will need the same kind of scale and origin systems as planets.

SGT does come with a very basic ocean shader which can be applied to a second terrain layer, giving you a planetary ocean, but it doesn't have any waves, refraction, etc.

Deforming the terrain is not possible without modification of the terrain code.

 

Thanks for the response!

Yeah I'm not too keen on the amount of scaling going on, was something I was going to address at a later date.

What would be the recommended maximum size/scale that this could work with, or do you have any suggestions on how SGT could be implemented to allow for such scales, I'm currently using a 1:100 (or 1:1000) scale? For example could I render in the 'local area' when up close (IE landed on the planet) whilst distant areas are rendered at the normal scale. Essentially creating a second smaller game object to act as the physical terrain the player can walk on that is placed over that section on the planet (so the superscaled objects would be for show etc)

By height components, is this like extra layers on top of a planet (object) etc?

Does SGT work with other ocean shaders, or do you have any recommended ocean packs that work well with SGT (in the event that I need to make changes etc)

 

The maximum scale of planets depends entirely on the device you want to target. As a general rule I say you should imagine how planets are in Spore for the kind of detail that could be done out of the box right now.

When you say 'local area', if you mean adding a '2D' high detail terrain above where you're about to land, then this is indeed a good way to get a very high detail planet. The only downside being you wouldn't be free to move around the planet from this high detail terrain perspective. If you mean using SGT's terrain system to create a low and high detail terrain, then that's what the LOD system already does, except there's no feature to automatically switch the Layers to allow separate camera rendering, but this wouldn't be difficult to add. As I said above though, think Spore sized planets, so the current one layer system should be sufficient and not cause many floating point issues.

Yes, the SgtTerrain component has a few public delegates you can hook into to augment the height, material, etc. The SgtTerrainSimplex component for example adds a layer of simplex noise to the terrain heights.

I have no idea which ocean oceans would be compatible. The current terrain system doesn't output tangents though, and one user notified me that this caused at least one ocean shader to not work. In the next version this will be fixed though. I imagine any shader that works on a generic sphere will also work with SGT.

 

Possible to do solar eclipse? If not, is there any future plans for this?

 

Yes, you just need to add the SgtSphereShadow component to your moon, and drag and drop the shadow into the Shadows field in your planet atmospheres, cloudspheres, etc. The next version of SGT will include the 'Solar Eclipse' demo scene demonstrating this.

 

I see, does this work with terrain objects too? Cause I've tried the sphere shadow layering stuff and it only allow meshes, not terrain objects.

Edit nevermind, it works. Just needs to set the layer on all level 0.

 

Hello!

I am making a space game and needing a galaxy that is fully procedural as well as infinite and can procedural a bunch of planets on runtime without doing anything major to gpu/cpu/memory. It is Multiplayer. Sort of like no man sky.

Is this possible with space graphics toolkit?

Thank you!
XaloX

 

No, SGT mainly deals with the rendering of each individual space object like a planet, a star, etc. If you need a fully procedural universe with multiplayer using SGT then you need to combine them all yourself with a lot of programming skill.

 

Awesome!! Thank you!!

Cheers!
XaloX

 

How big can we made the planets before we start taking performance hits? for example the procedural placement with terrain? you have it set with a radius of 10 as default. but what if i want a bigger planet. im not saying a 1:1 of earth but what about 1:10 or even 1:100? is that possible with your package? i am asking because i tried, and my framerate went down. Would you be able to make a demo for it so we know which settings we need to use?

 

It mainly depends on the CPU of your target device. Scaling a planet to very high values in itself isn't an issue for performance, the performance issues come in depending on your LOD settings. The higher the LOD, the more vertices need to be calculated and updated whenever you move, and if your planet approaches realistic size, then to get good detail up close you need many LOD levels, each one using up more and more of the CPU. In the future I will work on this feature and improve it, but making an easy to use high detail realistic scaled planet system is a lot of work.

 

Hey Carlos,
Solved. Read Edit 4 for TLDR.

just a heads up / hint. I imported SGT 3.4 into a new project (Unity 5.5.1f1) and all terrains (also for the stars) appeared pink. It seems that SgtAtmosphereInner and -Outer could not open SgtLight.cginc albeit the file was there and had no issues/warnings directly. Changing the include to relative path worked for me and the Stars show properly.

So instead of #include "SgtLight.cginc" I have now #include "./SgtLight.cginc". Don't know if its just me or if this may cause any issues.
Just wanted to let you know but the issue is solved for me. So when noone else reports this no need to adress this.

Edit: SgtJovian, SgtCloudsphere, SgtRing have the same issue. And SgtShadow.cginc cause NO issues albeit its in the same directory. Very weird.
Edit2: Shadow Layer and Solar Eclipse also show pink (albei Unity shows no error here). So I have decided to apply this change to all shader includes.
Edit3: I have moved the whole SGT-folder into another one (extern) for overview purpose. Seems relevant.
Edit4: So the same also happens in a TextMesh Pro shader (missing cginc). It appears to be something on my system or setup. It's not a flaw in SGT itself. This means no worries for you .

regards
Henry

 

I am getting these weird random flashes from the earth material using sgtearthsurface shader. Any reason for this? I tried using materials and not the one in SGT and flashes went. But if I use the SGT Earth it violently flashes like the pics below. Please advise thank you.

 

Any chance we can see Procedural Clouds with the ability to view them in space, or standing on terrain?

 

Are you sure it's from the Earth? Considering it's bigger than the planet and atmosphere, I don't see how that's possible.

It looks like a lens flare or starfield star is rendering in the camera view or something.

If you can freeze camera movement at that precise moment then you should be able to disable GameObjects until you can identify exactly what's causing it, or use the Frame Debugger to step through the scene and find it.

From what I've seen, procedural clouds (i.e. fully procedural) rarely look convincing from a distance. I've seen some that look good up close when you're flying through, but these rely on very expensive ray marching and wouldn't work for a full planet. I plan to make a hybrid system where an offline texture is used like SgtCloudsphere, but as you approach the surface they transform into procedural volumetric clouds, but I'm currently too busy to research and develop new features like this.

 

Me again. I've got an issue where my wrapping box starfield (which is there to create ambient space dust) stops rendering whenever I look at my sun flare. The sun flare doesn't follow the camera, it's an object out in space, but when I make it that instead of a following camera I get the issue in the first place.

When facing the sun.


When not facing the sun (note the particles come back).

 

Does your sun flare use the SgtFlare feature, or Unity's native lens flare? Does this issue only occur when the flare GameObject is active?

 

It uses the SgtFlare, and only occurs when the flare game object is active.

 

Interesting. Assuming your flare is using the SgtCameraDepth, then I imagine the camera rendering to find the depth is breaking the starfield wrapping code somehow. I'll take a look at the code tomorrow and see if I can fix it.

Your project looks great btw, reminds me of Freelancer

 

Hi,

First off, thanks for a great asset. It's a genuine pleasure to use.

We're making an arena type game, with the arenas being walled in with asteroids. For a big circular arena, it's a straightforward case of using the Advanced Belt, however, I'd like to do something similar for the boxy/angular arenas. I used a Box Starfield with its blend mode set to Alpha Test, which is fine for placing the rocks, but I was wondering if there's a way to have a "lit" version, in the same way the Advanced Belt does it with the generated texture, select a light, etc?

Otherwise, is there another tool that adds lit quads like the Advanced Belt?

Thanks!

 

Can't you make the wall using 3D asteroid models? If so, they could be placed manually, or with the SgtDebrisGrid feature via 4 or more SgtBox shapes.

I don't think 99.9% of users would want lighting options for starfields, especially when it would only work in the Alpha Test mode, which I already think has very limited use.

 

I thought of this but would it not be expensive to have so many? A thousand or more per wall? That's why I wanted to go the 2D route, but if this will run okay then it would definitely solve the issue! Thanks!

 

If you mark them as 'Static' in the top of the inspector and don't disable Static Batching in the build settings then even a thousand asteroid models should optimize down to something that runs very efficiently. You can even do this with 2D sprites I believe if they look better for your project.

 

Hi, I'm trying to get shadows to work properly on my planets, Keeps Flickering. I can't seem to use 0.01 near clip planes, cause it will cause this. Any tips?

Shadows work 100% fine, if you can use 0.4+ near clip plane on camera. But the terrains require 0.01.

 

Terrains only require a low clip distance if the terrain radius or scale is low. If you increase this then you can use a higher value. You should experiment to find the best scale and also adjust the shadow distance and other settings.

 

This package looks great, I'm a potential buyer and I have some questions. Some may have been answered but its tough to search through 36 pages efficiently.

- Do asteroids have colliders? My game depends on every object having a collider, at the very least to know when it gets hit by my player.
- Do you have any more demos? I want to see as much/know as much as I can before spending $100. I looked at the webgl demos and those look awesome, but it sounds like there's a lot more this package offers.
- Do the stars emit light? I assume so since you mention shadow support, etc.
- Is the black hole a post-processing effect, or is that a physical object in space?
- I don't need any terrain-related features, is there a way I can get a 25% discount or can you sell a version without those?
- Do the auroras/lightning effects for planets work on any spherical objects? I'll be adding my own stars/planets too, and some from other assets.

Thanks!

 

Yeah, I've tried scaling it up to 10k and its even worse. Even with the camera near plane at 0.4 or 1. Could you show your shadow settings? This stuff is confusing.

 

Asteroid belt asteroids don't, because they're just billboards animated to orbit in the vertex shader, and designed to render very efficiently. Debris grid and debris spawner asteroids do, because they're spawned prefabs, but these don't orbit without a custom script.

There are many more features, but most of them require large textures to look good (e.g. planets), which makes the demo sizes huge and take up lots of bandwidth. However, I have plans to record some promotional style videos and images next month that will improve this.

If you add a Light component to them then they will, and SGT's shadow system can then use this light to cast large scale (e.g. planet and ring) shadows on other objects where Unity's shadow system is inadequate.

Both, it's a 3D object rendered with a post-processing effect, similar to how refractive water works in other packages.

I've considered doing this in the past, but keeping it all as one package is the best for everyone.

Yes, they are not required to be on top of SGT planets, and can be placed on any sphere or ellipsoid.

I've only tested with the default shadow settings, so I have no settings to give. I can test this a bit more when I finish off the new terrain system though.

 

Thanks for the info. In the meantime can you at least provide a list of any features not listed? Or maybe a count of how many different prefabs you have? This definitely seems like something I want but I don't need terrain stuff at the moment and am trying to decide if the rest of the package is worth it. There certainly are some pieces I want though.

 

All of the main features are listed on the store page description and screenshots. The only things missing are specific details about them, some minor scripts used to improve the example scenes, and experimental/WIP features I don't yet want to advertise as a selling point. You can see most of the prefabs in the screenshots and free media packs on the first post, the main purpose of this asset is to allow you to fully customize every visual setting of your objects, and not to provide a large media library, which is why there is no prefab list.

 

The package contents are listed on the AssetStore product page anyway. So viveleroi can see all prefabs, scripts, shaders and scenes contained in the package. The names are self explanatory.

@viveleroi: There is no reason to reason to hesitate to purchase SGT. If you do a space related game and don't want to do the graphics yourself you have not much choice. SGT is the best one-fits-all solution you can get. Even if you only need a fraction of the contained effects and components. And Carlos constantly updates SGT whereas most other packages are "release and forget".

 

I am going to purchase it in the following days. I was just waiting if i was lucky enough in the DevDog giveaway, but sadly no.

Edit: I read on aprevious post that planet surface shadows are not working by default because of the surface shader? Is this still an issue? Can anyone post a screenshot on the planetary surface example?

 

Excellent work! I am glad to see this package to improve and still be worked on.

Quick question about the demo scenes; do you have updated demo scenes available to download somewhere? I did get the package years ago, but I did update it recently, and I noticed that there were fewer demo scene in it. Thanks!

 

Hi,

Any chance for a pulsar animation demo scene? There was a discussion about it some time ago on this thread.

Thanks!

 

I made this with the help of Space Graphics Toolkit Thank you so much for such a easy to use and helpful asset!

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Available now on Amazon App Store , Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Microsoft Store and Steam! ​

Links

Available on Steam

Download on the App Store

Download on the Mac Store

Get it on Google Play

Available at Amazon

Get it From Microsoft

Available on itch.io

Available on Game Jolt

Play online on Kongregate

Play online on Newgrounds

YouTube Trailer

Screenshots







































Planetarium 2 Zen Odyssey is a fun and interactive way to explore, discover and play with the solar system and beyond. Create, destroy, and interact with real time physics on a scale you have never-before imagined! Planetarium 2 Zen Odyssey provides a grand open-ended sandbox experience. The experience allows you to view many celestial simulations, engage in planetary traversal and travel to the furthest reaches of our world with space rockets, probes, rovers and more!

Features

Expansive Sandbox Experience

Explore our solar system and view our planets, dwarf planets and moons. Discover exoplanets light-years away beyond our own solar system. View Kepler Systems and the TRAPPIST-1 solar system. Enjoy stunning views of our Milky Way, and galaxies such as Andromeda and more. Super massive black holes to view such as the Sagittarius A*.

Custom Solar Systems and Planetary Collisions

Create your own Solar Systems by adding/removing planets. Edit properties such as the planet orbit radius, direction and speed. You can even scale planets and objects to your liking. Do you want to create an Earth larger than our sun? Go for it! Launch massive planetary bodies and asteroids to view planetary collisions on an astronomical level. Hurl planets and everyday objects and watch gravitational physics in action.

Create and Terraform Planets

Melt polar caps by increasing the temperature or freeze the planet entirely. Add vegetation, clouds, water and planetary rings with its own asteroid belt. Increase the population of your very own planet. Procedurally generate infinite planet variations and terraform a selection of planets, even a mysterious ringed planet!

Realistic and Detailed Space Probes and Satellites

View numerous probes that have been sent to explore our planets and to discover more about our universe. View detailed models of the ISS, Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizons, Hubble Telescope, Cassini, Juno, Galileo, Dawn, Ulysses, Aquarius, Deep Impact, Maven and many more!

Seamless Planetary Exploration

Launch off into space with the Apollo Lunar Launch Module or the Phoenix Mars Lander and land anywhere on a planetary body. Blast off with the Space Shuttle and other space rockets to explore fully sized planets. The seamless surface to space exploration allows you to land on any planet that you see. Traverse planets with the Lunar Rover, Curiosity Mars Rover, Mars Exploration Rover and more. Become an astronaut and drift around the International Space Station with the help of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU).

and much more…

View solar flares and asteroid belts. Procedurally generated stars and galaxies. View beautiful Pulsar stars and gravitational waves. Light-warping black holes that distort space. Check habitable zones of our solar system. View stunning beautiful scenic spaces scenes with aurora borealis from space, lighting weather effects and the solar eclipse.

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That looks incredible man! Can't wait to finally be done with University exams and get my hands on this asset!

How did you handle scale? I watched the KSP show and researched many and many articles about creating huge universes but i just can't wrap my head around how to implement it in Unity. I know about multiple cameras and floating-origin, but do you have a helpful guide on this maybe?

 

I don't think what I made is anything close to KSP In terms of the planets they are just large and the actual rockets and crafts scale are very small! (e.g craft size 0.1 0.1 0.1 and the planets something like 100,100,100) just an example nothing fancy lol

 

Is there a manual on how to use this? For example, is there a tutorial on how to use Debris Grid/Spawner? And all the other components? I can't find anything on the web except for the 3 youtube videos the creator put up... which are useful only for the more common components like lense flare and atmosphere.
Thanks...

 

The planets use normal unity shaders/materials, so there are no issues with shadows that wouldn't happen with any other GameObject. Keep in mind the atmosphere effect laid on top doesn't support Unity shadows, but typically planets don't have much atmospheric fog up close for this to be an issue, and for large distances the SGT shadow system can be used for planet/ring shadows, eclipses, etc.

When I make major updates to SGT components it tends to break them, requiring the GameObjects to be recreated with new settings. Over the years most features have been rewritten, and instead of keeping the old scenes I tend to just make new ones. If you had a specific scene in mind then I can try remaking it for the next version though?

There's no specific pulsar feature in SGT because I'm not sure what users would expect it to look like. If you can link to a video showing the exact effect you'd want to see then I can try recreating it.

Great job on the release! Looks great, and being able to spawn stuff is fun.

The next major version of SGT will include an origin shifting system. I've already written it, but I think it's best to integrate it into the terrain system rather than just release it as a standalone tool.

There's no tutorial for these components yet. I recommend you check the demo scenes that implement them and see what settings are used. I try to keep the setting names as intuitive as possible, and each setting has tooltips that add a bit more detail, as well as the component documentation which adds even more info than the tooltips. I have serious plans this year to make more comprehensive video tutorials for all the assets, because it's definitely something many people want and my assets are very weak in.

 

Something like this:

 

Thanks for the great work! How soon can I expect to see the Floating Origin functionality? Hmmm... I see a new release since the post on Wednesday. Maybe it is in 3.4.2, I'll look.

 

The actual pulsar part of these effects seems to just be the two beams coming from the poles, which can be done just fine with Unity's built-in particle system. I'll see what I can do though.

If you don't need terrain support then you can try an early build HERE. The updates coming out now mainly focus on rewriting and improving the terrain system. I don't know exactly when I will get around to implementing it into the main SGT build, but I imagine it will be late this month or next month.

 

Excellent!

 

This package has a lot of awesome features, but most of them are pretty much useless to me since it would be more work to make them compatible with my framework than creating them from scratch (like dynamic LOD and Terrain generation). So I was wondering if you would be willing to split some of your features into seperate packages? Like one for the atmospheric scattering and planetary shader maybe?

 

I have no plans to do this. Mainly because most of the example scenes and media packages make use of multiple features, and splitting the asset up like this would force me to limit each scene, or create a bunch of different scenes that feature a limited selection of effects.

 

I'm not sure if this has been requested or not, but do you have any plans to include a cloud system with SGT? I use the atmosphere and starfield components in my game releasing shortly. So I've seen the current clouds in action which work fine for viewing from space, but not exactly feasible as clouds on a procedural planet right now.

Edit: I've just seen your previous response about creating volumetric clouds from a spherical texture while up close, that would be a great feature if you ever get a chance!

 

Also very interested in this.

 

Alright, I'll experiment with this for the next version. I still have a bit of a backlog to work through with my other assets first though!