Mapping with SpaceEngine

[Robulous]

Has anyone played around with procedurally-generated scifi universes of SpaceEngine?

I absolutely love it, the graphics are stunning and far superior to Celestia. It makes just the most gratuitous eyecandy as it allows you to fly into atmospheres and view up from the surface.

Most of the planets are procedurally-generated, but I know it's possible to insert your own worlds using textures and heightmaps. But I'm baffled as to how to get my flat planetary maps rendered into a form that SpaceEngine accepts. Does anyone have any experience with this? I've seen tutorials on their website but it requires installing all kinds of complicated command-line software that's extremely confusing. Anyone able to give an idiots guide walkthrough?

And here's some eyecandy just fyi

[johnvanvliet]

SE uses Cube maps

Celestia and the spinoff "Cosmographia" use simple cylindrical and cube maps

all 3 use Virtual textures in a similar way with a similar naming scheme

an example -- cubemap and a simplecylindrical


The SE forum has a long post about hires VT cube maps
and it links to a windows ONLY tool

me , i use the perl pano-tools for hugin to convert a simple cylindrical image to a cube and Visa-Versa

I've seen tutorials on their website but it requires installing all kinds of complicated command-line software that's extremely confusing

that was likely one of my posts on the SE forum . I tend to use the terminal for a LOT of image manipulation

my only real issue with SE right now is accurate orbits ( i need VERY hi degree of accuracy ) and use the NASA/JPL - NAIF spice kernels for the planetary and Space Craft orbital and orientation data .

enough accuracy that a Eclipse on Europa caused by Io as seen from earth is +- 1 min. from the theoretical calculated time in a published paper

[Robbie]

Wait, does spaceengine render to cube map?

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[johnvanvliet]

SE really dose not export a texture
-- you can , i think ,get a tiny 512x256 px image

but for non generated images it uses 6 images , one for each side of a cube

see the Developers post
http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/17-376-1

[Robbie]

So it uses cube maps for planet textures? I guess I need to download it and check it out. I use cube maps in godot as environments when I'm making games. To be able to export a cube map render of the current procedurally generated view would be super helpful.

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[Robbie]

Btw. What you're referring to as cylindrical... Is that the same as equirectangular?

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[Robulous]

that was likely one of my posts on the SE forum . I tend to use the terminal for a LOT of image manipulation

Aha - perhaps I'll give it another go and ask you to help step me through it when I get stuck. I just really love the visual effects and being able to fly down to the planet's surface to view how the moons and stars look from the ground!