"Bumpy" Jovian Moons

[Clavius0712]

I've been doing a lot of flights taking off and landing on the moons of Jupiter (Callisto and Europa in particular) and the surfaces of these moons seem a lot bumpier than Luna for instance. It looks like they are using a lower polygon count - making them look like a giant polyhedral rather than a sphere. Is there a reason for this and can it be changed - say by substituting in the Luna mesh scaled to the correct size?

 

[the.punk]

I think this is an orbiter issue. It's because the planets are not rendert a spheres. And because they are so small you see the effect.

 

[cjp]

Nothing is rendered as sphere, not even Earth's moon. But at least Earth's moon consists of a lot more polygons, so it looks more spherical.

I don't know why Orbiter uses such a low-res mesh for the Jovian moons. Maybe it's just a default setting to make sure that Orbiter still runs fine on low-end systems: in that case it should be possible to change it somewhere. OTOH maybe it is related to the texture level. In that case, maybe installing a high-res Jovian moon add-on might solve the problem. At least you can try it (and don't forget to post the results on this forum: there might be others with the same problem).

 

[insane_alien]

you need the outer planets hi-res pack to get more spherical outer moons.

if orbiter had hi-res textures for every planet the download would be absolutely huge(more than 300MB)

 

[Clavius0712]

I think this is an orbiter issue. It's because the planets are not rendert a spheres. And because they are so small you see the effect.

FYI, Callisto is actually 40% bigger than the Moon, not smaller, so this can't be the cause. Ganymede is also bigger.

I will try one of the improved Jupiter moon textures on the Orbiter Hanger and report back the results.

It seems possible that the number of polys may be intentionally low due to the number of bodies in the Jovian system causing a performance hit but I will see if the higher res textures make any difference.

 

[Clavius0712]

Latest update:

I tried some hi-res moon textures and they all say to modify the moon's .cfg file to set the resolution from its default level of 5 to whatever the level is for the addon (usually 8).

I'm pleased to say all my Jovian moons are now nice and spherical at level 8!