Sample Worlds Torn Apart - The 1.1 Default World - Sky
This is a small writeup on some experiences looking at the settings of the default MojoWorld 1.1 planet. Figuring on learning by looking over somebody's shoulder, I tried to make sense out of the way things were done and to learn something from it.
Assuming you've read over the first tutorial, which works with the older "simple.mjw" world, this part won't spend any time on the standard settings, but will concentrate on the places where the worlds are different - which is just about everywhere. [Note, if your default scene doesn't look like the one above, you can download this copy.]
Since everything has its own little oddities, we might as well start at the highest altitude and work down. Let's check the sky.
We have sky color and a couple of cloud layers. The interesting thing here is the texture behind the sky - a black field with stars, formed by multiplying three different fractals together.
To perform color arithmetic, consider the colors as real numbers between 0 and 1. In this case, with a grayscale, that means zero is black and one is bright white. Creating a product of two color values will darken things unless they are both at maximum brightness. This means multiplying three fractals, one of which is a sparse convolution giving essentially random points, will produce a set of light points and a very dark background - stars. The fractals themselves have various settings for roughness, maximum and minimum feature size, and offset, which I assume were arrived at by trial and error to get "something that looks good." If not, the math is beyond me.
