Dynamic thrust colors#6352
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More thrust means higher temperatures
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What determines the thruster color? Engine model? Engine health? Ship class? |
Throttle amount |
sturnclaw
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sturnclaw
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General thoughts about the visual effect: deep red is generally immersion-breaking. Maneuvering thrusters are typically playing on the visual identity of a plasma jet or cold gas thruster (white/colorless spray), so a color temperature of 3000-5000K at the low end.
In general, varying the color of the entire thruster flame rather than having it fall off at the edges of the thrust plume is going to look slightly unrealistic, and regardless of the "real" Planck temperature of the thruster, the center will be an out-of-range white when viewed through a camera or human eye anyway.
I've left a comment below about the technical implementation that will need to be resolved before this is considered for merge.
| @@ -140,16 +140,18 @@ namespace SceneGraph { | |||
| // emissive.r is the thruster power setting which effects flame length and brightness | |||
| m_tMat->emissive.r = m_glowMat->emissive.r = 255.0f * displayedPower; | |||
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| // emulate thruster temperature | |||
| double temperature = MathUtil::Lerp(0.0, 30000.0, power); | |||
| vector3d thrustColor = PhysicsUtil::GenerateTemperatureColor(temperature); | |||
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Once again, this is an excessive consumption of CPU cycles for something that should be a 30 or 60-entry precomputed lookup table. Feel free to store an interpolation curve with each entry in the LUT for maximum accuracy, but computing 48 wavelength bands per thruster, every frame is simply wasteful.
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@bszlrd along which dimension do you think thruster color is best variable? Throttle amount? Engine type? Engine class, ship model? Engine health? I'm thinking throttle amount is already keyed to sound and size of flame? |
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I'm not sure it is good to vary the colors on the fly. Thust power ( (thrust*EV)/2) could be a good candindate. Or EV directly. Anyhow, I think such things should be data driven. As in defined in the ship.json, say as a color for 0% thrust and 100%. |
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Make thrust color non-static. Only white/blue at full, smolder to yellow/red when barely fired.
Temperature clamp'ed between 0 and 30000K