Creating planetary rings

[Piper]

Does anybody have any guidance for creating rings that are perfectly round? I'm trying to make some rings for Jupiter, based on images from New Horizons, but I'm having some difficulty. I can make the texture files without any problem, but I'm having trouble rounding-out the texture so that it doesn't look jagged.

 

[Piper]

Can anybody provide any help with this?

 

[Bj]

sorry, I have no experience at this,

good luck though

 

[Chode]

Maybe I can give a little help. I created a new Saturn ring texture based on Cassini pix a few years ago (which you should still be able to find). What I did was to take the default Saturn_ring.tex files from Orbiter, and dis-assembled them into individual dds files, then created new dds files that had the same geometry as those files, then re-assembled them into a new Saturn_ring.tex file. This was necessary because the the geometry of the dds files is different for different levels of texture.

One way of dis-assembling .tex files is with a hex editor, since each dds block begins with the text "DDS".

Regards

 

[Piper]

Maybe I can give a little help. I created a new Saturn ring texture based on Cassini pix a few years ago (which you should still be able to find). What I did was to take the default Saturn_ring.tex files from Orbiter, and dis-assembled them into individual dds files, then created new dds files that had the same geometry as those files, then re-assembled them into a new Saturn_ring.tex file. This was necessary because the the geometry of the dds files is different for different levels of texture.

One way of dis-assembling .tex files is with a hex editor, since each dds block begins with the text "DDS".

Regards

That's a good idea, but the size of Jupiter's rings are different from Saturn's, and I know that when I change the size of the rings, it messes up how it renders them. I need to find out the best way to do it from scratch.

 

[Chode]

There are Jupiter rings included in the "Outer Planets" add-on, but I'm not sure who made them. If you can get that add-on and see how those were done, it might help you out.

Regards

 

[2552]

Here's the Hi-res Saturn rings Chode made. Also, for extracting .dds files from .tex files, pltex decompiler works great.