Atlases

An atlas is the highest level object in a planetary assembly: an atlas aggregates all other documents that are needed to compose an entire planet. It contains:

Note that Clouds and Clouds covers are not part of atlases. They can be added over a scene that has an atlas or not.

An atlas also defines the atmosphere layer of a planet.

Creating an atlas

Like all other documents, let's follow the atlas creation procedure:

  1. Open the atlas document view and click on the create atlas button.
  2. Open the atlas document by double clicking on it.

We'll see several tabs in the atlas contents. As said earlier there are two main functions covered by atlases:

  1. Defining a planet's atmosphere.: We'll define the atmospheric parameters of the planet, so this is the look of the sky.
  2. Defining a planet's contents: We'll define the contents of the planet, this is landmasses, terrains and biomes involved.

Using an atlas

There are two kinds of atlases: atlases that have been compiled and atlas that have NOT been compiled. The compilation of an atlas is a task found in the atlas view toolbar:

An atlas, like most documents, can be dragged into the current scene. It'll become the atlas of the scene. A scene can only have one atlas at a time. When the atlas is set in the current scene:

So unless you're working on a planetary assembly, there's no need to compile an atlas. If you do want to work on a planetary assembly, then you'll have to Defining a planet's contents first and then compile the atlas.

Defining a planet's atmosphere.next page