Procedural Universe Rendering

I recently installed a new version of Microsoft Visual Studio on my home machine where I develop 3DWorld. The upgrade from MSVS 2010 to MSVS 2015 had been delayed until I found a good deal on the latest version, which sells for hundreds of dollars. I managed to get a used copy on amazon.com for a fraction of the retail price, and it seems to work just fine.

Overall it only took me a few hours to get 3DWorld building and running with the new compiler. There were various minor fixes for syntax errors and warnings, and I had to rebuild some of the dependencies. However, the upgrade did require me to spend a lot of time setting up my universe mode scenes, for about the fourth time in the history of 3DWorld. My universe scenes were all invalidated and had to be reconstructed because the planets were different types and in different places. I had to re-place the ships and space stations and change various parameters.

The problem is that that the built-in random number generator values changed again. It seems like every version of Visual Studio gives me different values from rand(). Normally I wouldn't use the system rand() because it's slow, poor quality, and varies across compilers/OSes. I have my own custom random number generator that solves these three issues that I've been using since I switched to MSVS 2010 about 5 years ago. I thought that was the last time I would have to deal with the universe random seeds problem. I guess not.

Unfortunately, I missed a call to rand() that was used to precompute a table of Gaussian distribution random numbers to avoid generating Gaussian distributions on the fly. My custom random number generator was still being used to select a random entry from the Gaussian table, but the entries were all different. This distribution was used to select the temperature and radius of each system star. The star radius affected the planet orbits and the star temperature affected the planet types and environments. All of the galaxies and systems locations were the same, but within a solar system everything was different.

I fixed the problem and added a random seed config file parameter. This made it easy to regenerate the current system until I found one I liked, rather than having to fly around the galaxy looking for a suitable starting system for the player. I was looking for a seed that would give me a yellow to white star, an asteroid belt, and at least one of each type of interesting planet (Terran/Earth-like inhabitable, gas giant, ice planet, volcanic planet, ringed planet, etc.) In the process I came across some interesting and beautiful planets such as the gas giant in the screenshot below that looks like Jupiter.

Closeup of a procedural gas giant that looks like Jupiter, including small elliptical "storms".

Shadows

I settled on a system that had some interesting shadow effects, so I thought I would take some screenshots of the different types of objects that cast and receive shadows. Here is an image of a planet with a moon that is in the middle of the system's asteroid belt. I don't know if this actually happens in real solar systems, but it certainly makes for interesting gameplay. It's fun to watch the ships fly around the planet trying to (or failing to) avoid colliding with the asteroids. In this screenshot, I've positioned my ship so that the star is behind me and I'm in the shadow of the moon, looking at the asteroid belt and the planet, which is right in the middle of the asteroids.

Moon and planet casting shadows on an asteroid belt.

The small asteroids in the near field are fully shadowed and black, and the asteroids further away show a dark cone of shadow extending toward the planet in the center of the image. Some of the shadowed asteroids are difficult to see because they blend in with the black universe background, but you can definitely see shadowed asteroids contrasted against the planet. The shadow cone eventually disappears as the moon occludes a decreasing amount of the light from the star as the distance from the asteroid to the moon increases. This is similar to how, on Earth, shadows from nearby objects are much sharper than shadows from distant objects. Also note that the moon doesn't actually cast a shadow on the planet in its current position.

Here is a nice blue ocean planet that has a ring of asteroids around it. The ring casts a thin shadow near the equator of the planet. This can be seen as a thin dark line a bit below the center of the planet. This shadow is ray traced through the procedural ring density function in the fragment shader on the GPU to determine the amount of light that is blocked. The sun is behind my ship and a bit to the right. You can also see that the planet shadows the asteroid belt on the back left side. I found another planet where the moon should cast shadows on the rings, so I'll have to implement that in the code next.

Beautiful blue planet with asteroid belt rings. The rings cast a faint shadow on the planet and the planet casts a soft shadow on the rings.

I was lucky enough to find a rare occurrence of a moon casting a shadow on a planet - a solar eclipse! However, the relative sizes and distances between the star, moon, and planet in 3DWorld aren't to scale with real distances, so it may not represent a physically correct eclipse. I don't see these very often, and the previous planet configuration (MSVS 2010) didn't have one of these in any nearby star systems. The moon slowly revolves around the planet with an orbital period of around an hour, and after a few minutes of time the shadow no longer intersects the planet.

Rare occurrence of a moon casting a soft analytical shadow on a planet. The planet also reflects light onto the moon.

Note that the shadow has a physically correct umbra and penumbra. This is computed in the fragment shader when rendering the planet. The amount of light reaching the planet is calculated as one minus the fraction of the sun disk that is occluded by the moon. The sun is modeled as a circular/disk light source and the moon is modeled as a sphere projecting into a circle along the light vector. You can find the math for such a calculation here.

Bonus video of asteroid bowling! Here is a video of a planet plowing through the asteroid field at 100x speed, with a moon trailing behind it. I fixed the asteroid belt placement after recording this video.

Nebulae

Nebula rendering is not new to 3DWorld. I've shown images of 3DWorld's nebulae in previous posts such as this one. I recently went back and reworked the shader code that determines the color and transparency of each pixel in the nebula. I made a total of three changes:

1. Added an octave of low frequency 3D Perlin noise to modulate the density/transparency of the nebula to give it a more random, nonuniform shape rather than looking like a large sphere.
2. Increased the exponent of the noise from 2.0 to a per-nebula random value between 2.0 and 4.0 to produce stronger contrast between light and dark areas (wispy fingers).
3. Switched to additive blending to model emissive gas rather than colored occluding material for high noise exponent nebulae to give them a brighter appearance.

Here are some nebula screenshots. They show the evolution of nebula rendering as I applied my changes to the algorithm. The first two show the original algorithm, the middle two show changes 1 and 2, and the last four images show the final code. The stars in these screenshots are in front of, inside, and behind the nebula.

Keep in mind that nebulae are volumetric objects computed using 3D noise, not just 2D images. They are drawn with 13 crossed billboards, allowing the player to fly in and around them with minimal rendering artifacts. I got the idea from this video.

That's it for nebulae. I'll add some more images if I change the algorithm again in the future. Sorry, I haven't created any nebula videos. The fine color gradients just look horrible after video compression, and it ruins the wispy, transparent effect.