Celestia Forums

There is so much potential for great spacecraft and satellite scenery views in Earth’s proximity, yet it is a complicated and time-consuming task for the relative Celestia newcomer to wade through, evaluate, and implement the many available varieties of addons dedicated to improving the image detail and quality of the Earth’s appearance close-up. No doubt there are novice Celestia enthusiasts like me who have been so frustrated with the task that they eventually walked away from it, even though they know their overall Celestia experience would be so much better if only their home planet had a facelift.
Perhaps there are some suggestions from those who persevered to the end.

It's really not difficult to set up some super Earth views...
I'm using JESTRs 64k virtual texture...
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earth.php


With John Vs excellent 16k Cloud VT.

i found that jestr's 16K Virtual Earth takes a lot of time loading as the scenes change, even with my good video card. So, I deleted all the texture folders above level4, and the problem went away. I use his virtual Earth 16k to level4, VT Spec textures to level 4, a single 16K image file for night lights, and an single 8k normalmap texture. I tie that in with a 16k cloud map. The whole thing pages smoothly as you orbit Earth with no pauses or stutters.

Frank

--- edit ---

JVV wrote:For now most of us have respected Dr. Fridger Schrempp wishes on the making of a large map and the use of some of the tools
as a result my large 64k texture( reduced from the 86 k Blue-Marble) and normal map have NOT been posted on the ML ( might change ? )
instead i point folk to the VERY GOOD tutorials on making a good earth map

http://www.celestialmatters.org/?q=node/10
-- CM fourm
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewforum.php?f=3
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=18

Thanks, John!

There are good (old) reasons, why I required all textures processed with my F-TexTools/NmTools not to be published on the MotherLode. I also have never published my own texture work there...Apart from these old quarrels ( from before the time of JVV and Bob H. ! ), I had also hoped to stimulate this way that some people just download the raw imaging data and let my tools operate locally on their computers. That's what they were made for! Overall it might even take less time than downloading a full VT set. The required commands for automatically creating great "monster-sized" textures are really neither difficult nor time consuming to learn.

People (e.g. cartrite) also wrote scripts to make the whole process even more trivial. John already quoted the Tutorials on my CM site...

Fridger

Hmmm...

My mac can't use the F-TexTools by the good doctor, I was rather hoping that someone might be able to upload textures made by these tools. Oh well.

bh wrote:Hmmm...

My mac can't use the F-TexTools by the good doctor, I was rather hoping that someone might be able to upload textures made by these tools. Oh well.

Why that? Da-Woon Jung aka Dirkpit provided the MAC binaries (PPC and Intel) that are part of the distribution (e.g. http://www.celestialmatters.org/users/t ... .0pre4.zip).

http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewt ... 4&start=10

has instruction for OsX installation and use.

Fridger

Hi Fridger... yes... I downloaded and tried quite a few times...Had no success... dunno why.

These macs can be irksome and quirky individuals... ie. for no apparent reason I've lost my local server, apache and php stuff.

bh wrote:Hi Fridger... yes... I downloaded and tried quite a few times...Had no success... dunno why.

These macs can be irksome and quirky individuals... ie. for no apparent reason I've lost my local server, apache and php stuff.

We should trink a virtual beer together these days. Sure helps

Fridger

Question: How do we (or you?) know the VT's and the other textures on the Motherlode haven't been made with Fridger's texture tools if they're not allowed on there?

PlutonianEmpire wrote:Question: How do we (or you?) know the VT's and the other textures on the Motherlode haven't been made with Fridger's texture tools if they're not allowed on there?

If I wanted to know, I could immediately tell from the VTs. Only my tools produce varying tile sizes and further massive optimizations. Also there are no other tools on the 'market' that produce mathematically correct normalmaps near the poles.

Fridger