I have recently implemented a procedural generation system for planetary surfaces into Gaia Sky. In this post, I ponder about different methods and techniques for procedurally generating planets that look just right and explain the process behind it in somewhat detail. This is a rather technical post, so be warned. As a teaser, the following image shows a planet generated using the processes described in this article.
Left: a wide view of a procedurally generated planet. Right: the same planet viewed from the surface.
What is currently going on in Gaia Sky development?
3 minute read
In the past few weeks I have been implementing a couple of features into Gaia Sky. The first is the addition of variable star rendering. The second is the re-implementation of all point cloud render systems to use actual geometry (triangles) instead of point primitives. This post briefly offers a preview of these features.
Over the last two weeks I have released the feature-packed version 3.1.0 of Gaia Sky. Two bugfix releases (3.1.1 and 3.1.2) followed shortly to fix bugs and regressions introduced in the former. This post contains a small rundown of the most interesting features in these three new versions. Let’s get started.
In this post, I’m mirroring the Gaia Sky 3 tutorial I wrote for the official Gaia Sky documentation to use as a rough script for the workshop given in a splinter session of the 2021 DPAC consortium online meeting held on March 17 and 18, 2021. You can find the original page here.
Hint
This article is best viewed in light mode: lights on!
Dramatic performance improvements and lots of new features in Gaia Sky 3
10 minute read
It’s been a while since I last talked about new Gaia Sky releases. Today I’m doing a recap of the last four releases, starting with 3.0.0. This very verison came out with Gaia eDR3 on Dec 3, 2020. It was a big jump for Gaia Sky, as it introduced a plethora of new features and QOL improvements along with lots of bug fixes and little tweaks. This post goes over the latest versions from 3.0.0 to 3.0.3, and reflects on what they brought to the table.
Jump to the analysis for each of the versions directly:
Planetary surfaces, keyframed camera, new scripting and more
6 minute read
Today we are releasing a brand new version (2.2.0) of Gaia Sky with several major changes and new features. To sum up, github reports 1071 changed files, with 81672 additions and 31763 deletions. Gitlab displays a “Too many changes to show” banner, as their cap is at a 1000 files. This makes it by far the largest release ever, followed by version 1.5.0 in the summer of 2017.
