Cables

Gaea has a multitude of cables supporting its structure, similar to a suspension bridge. Here's a preliminary layout as seen from inside the torus. It's incomplete and incorrect, of course.

A new project: Celestia Addon for Troutweaver's models

Something a little simpler, since I don't have to make the models myself. Troutweaver's models need only a few minor tweaks, like resizing so Anim8or likes working with them and reorienting so rotations work appropriately. Here's an initial attempt, showing two of his models, Norway and Pell Station, as drawn by Celestia.

Bent, poked and stretched

It took me a while to find the scale and offset needed to persuade Anim8or's "bend" Modifier to torque a straight tube the appropriate 60 degrees. I'd made a tube with its length the same as 1/6 of the circumference of the desired torus, but most offsets for the bend Modifier kept stretching its outside circumference instead of leaving it unchanged.

Then there's the matter of keeping the spoke from being squished during the bending. Pre-stretching left it all lumpy. :(  I had to cut it off and then reattach it afterward. I think it's a little skinnier than it should be, but I'm not up to resizing it for now.

Celestia has a bug in how it draws transparent surfaces when they're regions of an single mesh which have had a transparent material applied to them: their surfaces aren't correctly depth-sorted. The workaround is relatively straightforward, though: cut them out and paste them into the mesh but leave them as separate objects.

Drawing Gaea

Infrequent posts are infrequent. :)

I've decided to try to model Gaea, a toroidal alien described by John Varley in his Gaean trilogy: Titan, Wizard and Demon. Some help with getting the sizes of its components correct was provided by someone who'd modeled it previously. In the Celestia screen-grabs below, individual components are separate meshes and have different colors. This is to help verify that the sizes are appropriate. In the final version, each 60 degree segment of the torus will be a single mesh, prodded into the appropriate shape. (Note that its mirrors are omitted for now.)

Using a rectilinear segment:

With the segment bent 60 degrees:

A Diary Addon for Celestia

After receiving an email asking if a Diary Addon might be available for Celestia, and realizing how simple it could be, I've implemented one. Although inspired to a certain extent by an episode of NCIS, this implementation is rather different. The (fake) NCIS version was implemented using Celestia to display the diary's contents. This version uses your favorite editor, external to Celestia. This Addon is available in the Celestia Web Forum at http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=16719

Modifying StarGen

Despite its name, StarGen is a program by Jim Burrows which designs planetary systems. It doesn't design stars. I downloaded its C sourcecode from
http://eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html and have been enhancing its code somewhat, primarily to improve its SSC catalogs for use with Celestia. I'll be using it to create planetary systems around the stars orbited by Alliance and Union stations.

Downbelow (without clouds)

If they could see down through the clouds from high orbit, here's a view of what Downbelow might look like. Its color palette was taken from NASA's Blue Marble images of the Earth.

(The image's layout is to make it usable for an FHD desktop with icons to the left.)