Celestia Forums

At last I managed to fill my Texture Foundry site,

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~t00fri/texfoundry.php4

with my actual 2k, 4k and 8k textures for Earth and Mars (at least).
They exist as [8:1] DXT1c files (*.dds.zip) and as JPG's.
Preview files will be uploaded very soon. The 2k and 4k textures are
size reduced by means of /cubic/ interpolation and thus are of optimal
quality given their size. All colors are, of course, identical in the
2k, 4k, 8k textures.

According to the new possibilities( Celestia >= 1.2.5) for specular lights,
I have provided the 4k specular files earth-spec.dds.zip and
mars4k-spec.dds.zip, mars4k-spec.jpg /separately/.

Here are the relevant solarsys.ssc portions, please
start by using the same specular illumination parameters,
since everything is tuned together!
(names to be adapted!!)

"Earth" "Sol"
{
# Texture "earth.jpg"
Texture "earth.dds"
NightTexture "earthnight.dds"
SpecularTexture "earth-spec.dds"
SpecularColor [ 0.51 0.55 0.51 ]
SpecularPower 35.0
# BumpMap "earthbump.jpg"
# BumpHeight 9.5
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
Radius 6378

---------------------------------------
"Mars" "Sol"
{
#Texture "mars.jpg"
Texture "mars.dds"
SpecularTexture "mars4k-spec.dds"
# SpecularTexture "mars4k-spec.jpg"
SpecularColor [ 0.14 0.12 0.10 ]
SpecularPower 15.5
Color [ 1 0.75 0.7 ]
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.45
Radius 3394

----------------------------------------

Finally, there are the following abbreviations in the rgb
texture file names:

BM = BlueMarble raw file
col = color desaturated
bmp = statically bumpmapped
um = unsharp masking to enhance sharpness
redcorr = red correction for mars

----------------------------------------

With these files and a standard 16k earth.dds texture (Pixel),
everyone should be able to reproduce /all/ images (except Pluto) in my
Texture Foundry Gallery.


Enjoy!

Bye Fridger

Good job Fridger....Im sure to use them...

I couldn't find your jpg versions of files
on your site. Where are they?

Thanks- Vic

Vicware wrote:I couldn't find your jpg versions of files
on your site. Where are they?

Thanks- Vic

;-)

For users entering my site who have chosen NVIDIA/DXT support, JPG's are not offered, since DDS is much supperior.

If you want to see JPG's, you must go back and pretend that your card has no DDS support...

It may be also useful for DDS users, since the JPG's may be displayed in the browser just by clicking them.

Bye Fridger

Help. I'm very anxious to try out the new textures for Earth and Mars. However, I am not sure what to do. Specifically:
1. Where do I load the 2K, 4K and 8K dds files (what Celestia folder)
2. The solarsys.ssc file calls for the texture to be "earth.dds", but none of the textures downloaded are named just "earth.dds". Do I change the name of the files to something else, or do I revise this ssc. instruction to call up some other file name?
3. The original solarsys.ssc file that came with Celestia calls for textures to be a .dds file extension. However, when I was looking for the folder to put your new textures, I failed to find the original earth.dds graphics file. Is Celestia reading the extension .dds to be a .png file or something else? How come Celestia displays Earth textures using a .dds file, when there are no .dds files in the Celestia folders?

Please help. Confused.

Frank G

Frank,

I think you're overlooking the fact that a sharp sign (#) is used to start a comment line in .ssc files. Anything after the # is ignored on that line.

There are several ways to do this. Here's what I did.

1) Find a texture you like. e.g. earth8k-BM-col-bmp-um.dds
2) Put it in an appropriate directory. e.g. /textures/medres
3) goto the /data directory and make a copy of solarsys.ssc for safekeeping e.g. solarsys.ssc_org
4) edit solarsys.ssc to change the appropriate planet's texture
e.g. use Notepad, open solassys.ssc and go down to the definition of "Earth" "Sol"
5) comment out the current texture definition by putting a "sharp" sign in front of it. e.g
# Texture "earth.png"
6) insert a line specifying the texture you want to use e.g.
Texture "earth8k-BM-col-bmp-um.dds"
7) Save the new solarsys.ssc
8) Start Celestia

By default Celestia looks in the directory /textures/medres for the specified file name. If you have appropriate files with the same name in /textures/lores and /textures/hires, then you can use the keyboard commands "r" (select next lower resolution) and "R" (select next higher resolution) to switch among them.

(note that I'm using the Unix convention for directory separators. Windows uses the backslant (\) instead.)

I hope this clarifies things somewhat.