planets questions

[lulu1315]

I'm having problems to understand heading/elevation/distance in relation to centre and radius in the planet node.
what exactly is heading/elevation/distance.
sorry if this is obvious

[cyphyr]

I asked the same a while back and got this from Matt:

Heading, Elevation and Distance are useful if you are placing a planet in the sky (e.g. as a moon) and want to use heading and elevation controls to position it in the same way you do with sunlight. They are angles measured in degrees. Distance is then the distance from 0,0,0 (in metres). If the planet is your main planet, usually you would ignore these settings. These settings are not new. They used to be tucked away under one of the tabs, but now all the planet's settings are laid out on the same panel. On some other objects you'll find the same settings under the "Angular Position" tab.

(The default elevation of 270 actually means -90, i.e. the centre of the planet is directly below the origin. It says 270 rather than -90 because of a quirk/bug when the value is automatically calculated from the planet's position, but you don't need to worry about it. 270 is the same as -90.)

Displacement tolerance was added for version 2.0. It is a feature on all of the "non-populatable" objects. From the changes log:

Some of the built-in objects have an adjustable displacement tolerance parameter. This can be used if you find that large displacements or spikey surfaces are causing errors at tile/bucket boundaries or gaps in ray-traced shadows. Be careful not to touch this setting unless you need to, because it can dramatically increase render times. The default value for most objects is 1, but lower values can be used to render relatively flat surfaces more quickly.

Matt

Hope it helps

Richard

[lulu1315]

thanks richard.

I want to create two planets and have them one on top of the other.
but I need a perfect symetry in y axis.
what I don't get atm is how to rotate my planet around her natural centre , like rotate around x (or z) 180 degrees to be upside down ?

[Oshyan]

Rotating planets in that way isn't currently possible unfortunately.

- Oshyan