clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> As Stephen already interpreted correctly, that's "mean" in the sense of
> "I hope that thing is not pointing its guns in my general direction" ;)
> - pretty much orthogonal to the question of whether I like the image in
> its entirety or not.

Ok, I think I understand now.

> But now that you're asking: I think the background stars are too bright
> in relation to Neptune and the ship, and Neptune looks a bit too flat
> somehow. I know the planet is pretty featureless, but AFAIK the blue
> stuff is a deep layer of gas, not a solid surface, so at least it
> shouldn't be perfectly crisp at the rim. (Then again I've never been
> assigned to the Stealthy Owls squad, so I don't know first hand how
> Neptune looks like in reality.) Also, adding some small-scale turbulence
> to the texture might help overcome the fact that the image map seems a
> tad too low-res for that scale.

I agree with you that my Neptune is not beautiful.
I've looked for a better image map but couldn't find anything. I will see how
turbulence can improve the texture.
At first I thought like you that the rim should be more fuzzy, but looking at
pictures on Internet it appears that it's rather invisible at the distance I've
located the camera from Neptune. The planet is so big that the fuzzy layer is
extremely thin in proportion, I guess. In the other hand I don't have to follow
strictly the reality of course...
The limit between area in light and area in darkness at the bottom right also
annoy me. I would like a clear border, so I should change the position of the
Sun.
Moving Neptune farther to make it smaller may be a solution to many problems,
but I like the composition of the image as it is. I also thought about using
another planet, but I like the idea of placing the spaceship at the edge of our
solar system, which in return made me think about using Pluto instead in
reference to recent news...
The background is a image map of the milky way. I have no idea how bright it may
be viewed from space. I'll see how the image looks if I make it dimmer.

> Last not least I see some color banding artifacts on Neptune's surface,
> but those should be trivial to eliminate by using the "Dither=yes" .ini
> option.

I didn't knew this option. I will try it.

> (Oh, and all of the above doesn't prevent me from liking the image. :))

Thanks again for your detailed comment :-)

Post a reply to this message