Cosmos Journeyer

Hello again! This is the 2nd post of the procedural space station series aiming at creating realistic space station for Cosmos Journeyer through the awesome power of science! The previous post about energy is not required to understand this one, but you can read it here if you are interested. In the previous article, we created a model for the surface of solar panels needed to power our space stations. But we also need to create habitable sections where people will live their life in comfort, just like you are doing right now I hope ^^ (make yourself at ease! [Read More]

How can we create realistic looking space stations? How to make them feel grounded and functional? That’s what I want to explore it this series of blog posts while developing the new space stations for Cosmos Journeyer. Here is a sneak peak: View from Cosmos Journeyer's space station In this first one, we will talk about solar panels. They are an iconic part of the look of space stations: from Mir to the ISS, and Tiangong to the upcoming Lunar Gateway, they all have them! [Read More]

Introduction It’s been a few month since I started pondering making a better ocean for Cosmos Journeyer’s procedural planets. To have actual waves moving around and not just a scrolling normal maps would make a significant difference in visual quality. Coincidentally, I was also taking a course on computer animation (INF585) at Ecole Polytechnique, and I had the opportunity to choose my final project. Long stroy short, I decided to implement Jerry Tessendorf’s FFT-based ocean simulation on WebGPU, and this is my project report. [Read More]

Okay, I know what you are thinking: “Non Euclidean Black holes? What is this guy talking about?”. I know, I told myself so at first, but bear with me, it is actually fun! What is a black hole? A black hole is a region of space where the gravitational field get so strong the bending of spacetime becomes very noticable (and deadly, mom’s spaghetti). It becomes so strong that scientists predict the bending becomes infinite at its center at what is called a singularity. [Read More]

Realtime shader programming is challenging. Although the GPU is very fast, when adding more and more shaders, you always reach a point where your GPU is no longer fast enough. This is where optimization comes into play. Shaders can be optimized in 2 ways: improve the shader code itself, which can give decent improvements, and precomputing data, which can make the difference between 20fps and 500fps. In this blog post series, I will be presenting how I optimized the shaders of Cosmos Journeyer: a procedural universe running in the web browser. [Read More]