Upcoming Improvements - Ambient Occlusion and Terrain Texture Overhaul

Hi all!
Coming in the next release is the addition of terrain Ambient Occlusion and with it, the overhaul of all of the planet textures.

The texture overhaul was at its beginning in Release 1 but is now almost complete, bringing with it some well needed quality improvements - In this post I'll share some of the new planets I'm most pleased with. I've gone a step further and made some (potentially polarising!) changes to some planets from orbit to make their far away appearance match the terrain up close.

Ambient Occlusion

For those of you that play with boosted ambient light, you may have noticed that the terrain at night lacks detail and mostly appears like a flat surface. With ambient occlusion, expect night-time to look much better with minimal performance impact. This can be disabled in the GUI.

Ambient Occlusion at Bop - Left: AO Off. Right: AO On

Ice Improvements

With the addition of Deferred comes the capability of utilising Unity's Standard PBR lighting pass to have proper environment reflections. Parallax utilises the Specular-Glossiness PBR workflow which allows the easy modelling of icy surfaces:

Ice at Vall, with Advanced Blending enabled and Tessellation Range set to 3000

Glass/Ice at Minmus

Ice showing terrain reflections at Minmus' Flats

Other planet texture improvements

Moho

I wanted to lean into the hexagonal metal pieces lying around on Moho's surface and represent it in the terrain itself while also enhancing the look of the planet's jagged cliffs. I kept the effect fairly subtle, hinting at the prescence of larger metallic formations beneath its rocky surface.

The surface of Moho

Ike

For Ike I wanted to more accurately convey a dusty surface. Previously it looked like a weird mix between dust and rock that didn't quite look right - its displacement maps were also severely crunched by compression from years back when I was more careless with the textures. I experimented with smooth marble-like cliffs to make the moon a bit more unique - let me know what you think!

The surface of Ike

Pol

Pol's a difficult mould-ball to work with. It has a lot going on in its colours - oranges, reds, yellows and greens across its surface. And since there's a lot going on with its colours I decided a lot should go on with its materials now that Parallax is capable of properly reproducing them. Pol's lowlands are icy, its midlands are clay and its highlands are dusty/rocky. Its cliffs are metallic and reflect a lot of light, with a golden appearance. It's too much to show off each material in a dev post that aims to show off more than just Pol, so I'll let you guys explore for yourselves when these changes are available!

Orbit Texture Changes

Vanilla KSP doesn't represent icy surfaces particularly well on the various planet surfaces (although, Vall is as close as we get to that and it's not too bad). I wanted to properly convey ice on a few of the moons but realised I would need to make changes to the orbit textures as well.

I get a lot of requests from planet modders asking if I could also improve the shaders of the planets from the map view and high orbit which is something I've looked into previously and, due to popular demand, will be doing so again in the near future. This means that eventually I'll need to remaster the planets from afar and so I've started some of the retextures already.

Some of these changes may be polarising - such as Minmus' flats being ice rather than a minty dust - of which I've taken inspiration from KSP2 which models the planets as such. Feedback is absolutely welcome (and encouraged!) so please do let me know your feelings and whether these changes sit right for you or not.

Minmus

Everyone argues over whether Minmus is icy, glassy, or dusty. Parallax will lean towards an icy/glassy appearance as that's the direction Intercept took Minmus in KSP2. If it's too much of a change and I receive enough requests, I'll provide an optional set of textures that make it dusty (similarly to the lifeless Eve patch).

Minmus from orbit, showing off its icy flats

Note that the look of the ice will improve once I've replaced the Vanilla shaders with my own, but this will come after Release 2

Pol

Pol is a mighty difficult moon to texture. What is Pol? What the hell is it made out of? People argue about Minmus and whatever substance it is but Pol is even more of an enigma. So, with this in mind, please understand I have done my very best to stay true to the Vanilla vision for this moon and merely improve upon a very very difficult starting point!

Pol from orbit

Final Words

These are just some of the texture improvements coming! All planets will receive support for Ambient Occlusion. For the planet modders among you, Release 2 will not break existing Parallax Continued configs - ambient occlusion defaults to Off on planets that don't support it. Laythe won't be getting any changes as its textures are still very solid today, but it will receive support for ambient occlusion.

I aim to have Release 2 ready in the following couple of weeks, depending on my IRL workload. I can't wait to share it! Until then, I'll toil away on the remaining planets (5 to go).

o/