Outlook cloudy... and bumpy!

As mentioned in the last post, among other things, I needed to add clouds and the POV-Ray export. The initial POV-Ray export lacked bump mapping, so was flat looking.  It also needed to be flipped horizontally and vertically.  I think the handedness of the coordinate systems was different.

POV-Ray rendering of initial POV export from the Planets program.  Note that it is rather flat looking.

So I added the export of the bump map information, and added a scaling statement to the POV export such that the image map was applied in the necessary flipped manner.  It didn't look nearly so flat.

POV-Ray rendering of POV export, this time with bump mapping applied.

I also added the first cut of the cloud feature.  Below is a screenshot as seen in Planets and as rendered in POV-Ray, though from different angles.

Planets showing the initial version of clouds applied.

POV-Ray rendering of Planets export, with bump map and clouds.

I'm not entirely happy with clouds at this point, and think I need to invest more time still.  Also, the Map doesn't currently show the clouds.  I may enhance the map view so it does.

At this point, aside from completing the clouds, the "dimple" at the center of craters is probably the last major visual component that I need to complete before making an initial release.  There's other things that need to be done - code cleanup, UI for entering parameters to control planet formation, possible performance improvements for noise generation - but with crater and clouds working properly it will be more-or-less feature complete.  By next weekend I hope to be at that stage and have this up on GitHub.  We'll see what the coming week actually holds.