Solar System Simulator Project Checkpoint Adam Poppenheimer

Premise A scene of a solar system, inspired by Ringworld. Planets rotating around a sun, with a large planet-surfaced ring around them. Lighting effects: point-lighting, lens flare, shadows Adding details to planets and ring: specular and bump mapping, lights only active when the surface is dark Only using a matrix library (glMatrix); doing everything else by hand

What’s Been Completed Mostly tools at this point. Can generate a planet or a day/night slab with an arbitrary size, orbit Can recursively generate moons around a planet Incremental improvements on labs – Point-lighting, per-fragment shading, object-oriented instantiation, a camera with primitive rotational abilities Procedural generation of the main ring

What’s Still in the Pipeline Adding the sun – Since the camera is stationary, can probably just add a 2D texture pasted onto a plane facing the camera Shadows – Going to use a 3D depth texture to figure out what fragments point-light will affect. Details via specular/bump/”lighting” maps – May also add a cloud layer to certain planets: a shell that rotates independently of the planet’s rotation Application of textures onto ring – A nontrivial problem when performed in Javascript More sophisticated camera movement – Mouse-driven instead of WASD driven (no tank controls) Adding more advanced lighting effects – Lens flare definitely, possibly bloom if it has any effect Assembling the scene proper (once all the functionality has been built)