Celestia Forums

How can I create hires textures for earth (for example)? I have downloaded the 8192x4096 earthmap from Earth Visible, which is in tiff-format with an alpha mask.
I would like to convert this to png and keep the mask (like in the original midres/eath.png), but I could not figure out how to do this - is gimp able to do the job?

What painting program do you have currently?

If you're keeping the resolution to 8192x4096 then I don't think that PNG will suffice... I've already converted the image put it in the hires directory, but I'm fairly sure Celestia is down-rezzing it to 4096x2048 when I switch to the hi-res version, probably to fit it into memory (and don't even try the hi-res cloud map). DXT1 compression is probably necessary.
Chris, could you please tell us the exact steps required in converting the TIFF/PNG into a DDS? I've tried using the DirectX texture utility that comes with the DirectX SDK, but it doesn't seem to work properly on textures this big.

Uhhh, my bad The PNG I created was 4096x2048... However, a PNG of size 8192x4096 does turn out to be too large for my video card, so I would like some details of how Chris successfully converts this to a DDS. I'll wrestle with dxtex some more...

Finally, I found a corresponding post on the developers forum. It says that Photoshop had difficulties in converting the alpha-mask, but that it is possible to save map and mask to separate files and combine them.
I managed to do this with the tools from ImageMagick and have a working 4096x2048 earth.png

I have no idea how to use hardware supported texture compression, though...

That's strange, I've only ever needed Photoshop to convert it successfully. It's been a while since I did it, so I don't rmember exactly what I did... I think all that was needed was that the mask needed to be inverted to be how Celestia wanted it... I definitely didn't need to use anything but Photoshop to do it.
Has Chris ever outlined the steps he takes to process/convert the various types of images? 'Twould be useful...

Here's a 8192x4096 Earth texture:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/bigearth.zip

Install this in textures/hires (actually, textures/medres works fine too), and change this line in solarsys.ssc:

Texture "earth.png"

to:

Texture "earth8k.dds"

This texture will probably only work on cards with 64MB of memory, though there's a slight chance it will work on a 32MB. There's no gloss map included with the texture, so specular highlights from the ocean won't work correctly. Finally, I know this texture will load properly with a GeForce card and I suspect it will work with a Radeon as will. I'd like to hear any compatibility reports.

I know it's clunky to have to change solarsys.ssc to use this texture; the current multiresolution texture handling code in Celestia doesn't work so well when the different resolutions have different file extensions.

I created this texture from the Blue Marble map from NASA. It was converted to DDS format in Photoshop using a plugin from nVidia. You can get the plugin here:

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=ps_texture_compression_plugin

--Chris

That's just the conversion utility I needed. Thanks Chris!

chris wrote:Here's a 8192x4096 Earth texture:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/bigearth.zip

Install this in textures/hires (actually, textures/medres works fine too), and change this line in solarsys.ssc:

Texture "earth.png"

to:

Texture "earth8k.dds"

This texture will probably only work on cards with 64MB of memory, though there's a slight chance it will work on a 32MB. There's no gloss map included with the texture, so specular highlights from the ocean won't work correctly. Finally, I know this texture will load properly with a GeForce card and I suspect it will work with a Radeon as will. I'd like to hear any compatibility reports.

I know it's clunky to have to change solarsys.ssc to use this texture; the current multiresolution texture handling code in Celestia doesn't work so well when the different resolutions have different file extensions.

I created this texture from the Blue Marble map from NASA. It was converted to DDS format in Photoshop using a plugin from nVidia. You can get the plugin here:

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=ps_texture_compression_plugin

--Chris

Right on...thanks Chris...

BTW, Adobe does not load the PNG files properly...Is there a way to create something like earth.PNG using adobe? Alpha1 is B/W so I suspect I wouldnt use this...

I loaded this texture and it looks great with my Radeon 64DDR. Now we just need a texture of this quality for the nightside

Thank you again Chris for the earth.dds texture . I just want to tell you that it works very well with my 32 MG GEFORCE2 GTS card. Do you expect to do the same for Mars and the Moon? 20 MG Marstexture is fine but "slow" in the .jpg format
Regards
MB

Anonymous wrote:Thank you again Chris for the earth.dds texture . I just want to tell you that it works very well with my 32 MG GEFORCE2 GTS card. Do you expect to do the same for Mars and the Moon? 20 MG Marstexture is fine but "slow" in the .jpg format
Regards
MB

I have 4096x2048 .dds textures for both the Mars and Moon. I'll post links to them later today.

--Chris

chris wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you again Chris for the earth.dds texture . I just want to tell you that it works very well with my 32 MG GEFORCE2 GTS card. Do you expect to do the same for Mars and the Moon? 20 MG Marstexture is fine but "slow" in the .jpg format
Regards
MB

I have 4096x2048 .dds textures for both the Mars and Moon. I'll post links to them later today.

--Chris

I would really appreciate trying a 4096x2048 .dds earth texture with my 32MB Geforce2 GTS card. The "bigearth" 8Kx4k .dds does not seem to work correctly with my 32MB card. There is some texture seen, but it is dim and not highres.

Does anyone know about a plugin for generating .dds files with Gimp???

Fridger

chris wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you again Chris for the earth.dds texture . I just want to tell you that it works very well with my 32 MG GEFORCE2 GTS card. Do you expect to do the same for Mars and the Moon? 20 MG Marstexture is fine but "slow" in the .jpg format
Regards
MB

I have 4096x2048 .dds textures for both the Mars and Moon. I'll post links to them later today.

--Chris

I would really appreciate trying a 4096x2048 .dds earth texture with my 32MB Geforce2 GTS card. The "bigearth" 8Kx4k .dds does not seem to work correctly with my 32MB card. There is some texture seen, but it is dim and not highres.

Does anyone know about a plugin for generating .dds files with Gimp???

Fridger

Here are some big planet textures for Celestia:

8192x4096 Earth texture
4096x2048 Earth texture
4096x2048 Moon texture
4096x2048 Mars texture
2048x1024 Io texture

I'm afraid that there's still no elegant way to install these--you'll have to modify your solarsys.ssc file. Download these only if you have a graphics card that supports DXT1 compressed textures in OpenGL--it appears that this means just Radeon and GeForce owners right now.

--Chris

Um, how do you use .dds files? I put the Earth 8k one in my hires folder, but it didn't load. I have a 32 MB GeForce 2 MX PCI, so is that the problem?

There's a spectacular USGS shaded-relief map of Mercury in simple cylindrical projection available as a 5760x5760 pixel (only includes the hemisphere seen by Mariner 10) grayscale tiff image. Filesize is 10 MBytes. The URL is:

http://www.earth.nwu.edu/people/robinso ... e_simp.tif

Perhaps someone will volunteer to resample it to a Celestia-friendly size, fake the hidden hemisphere, and add appropriate color?

Good news from NASA today, BTW: MESSENGER mission is on track for a 2004 launch to Mercury. We should have a real map of the unseen side sometime in 2009 or so, if all goes well...

- Hank

chris wrote:Here are some big planet textures for Celestia:

8192x4096 Earth texture
4096x2048 Earth texture
4096x2048 Moon texture
4096x2048 Mars texture
2048x1024 Io texture

I'm afraid that there's still no elegant way to install these--you'll have to modify your solarsys.ssc file. Download these only if you have a graphics card that supports DXT1 compressed textures in OpenGL--it appears that this means just Radeon and GeForce owners right now.

--Chris

Something seems to wrong: Both under Linux and Windows the system crashes upon loading the 4k /and/ 48 earth?k.dds files. Here is what glxinfo says about my 32MB Geforce 2 GTS grafic card:

name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx version string: 1.2
client glx extensions:
GLX_ARB_get_proc_address, GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_EXT_visual_info,
GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context, GLX_SGI_video_sync,
GLX_SGIX_swap_group, GLX_SGIX_swap_barrier, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
GLX extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_ARB_get_proc_address
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce2 GTS/AGP/SSE
OpenGL version string: 1.3.1 NVIDIA 28.02
OpenGL extensions:
GL_ARB_imaging, GL_ARB_multitexture, GL_ARB_texture_compression,
GL_ARB_texture_cube_map, GL_ARB_texture_env_add,
GL_ARB_texture_env_combine, GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3,
GL_ARB_transpose_matrix, GL_S3_s3tc, GL_EXT_abgr, GL_EXT_bgra,
GL_EXT_blend_color, GL_EXT_blend_minmax, GL_EXT_blend_subtract,
GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array,
GL_EXT_draw_range_elements, GL_EXT_fog_coord, GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays,
GL_EXT_packed_pixels, GL_EXT_paletted_texture, GL_EXT_point_parameters,
GL_EXT_rescale_normal, GL_EXT_secondary_color,
GL_EXT_separate_specular_color, GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette,
GL_EXT_stencil_wrap, GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc,
GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp, GL_EXT_texture_env_add,
GL_EXT_texture_env_combine, GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3,
GL_EXT_texture_cube_map, GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic,
GL_EXT_texture_lod, GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias, GL_EXT_texture_object,
GL_EXT_vertex_array, GL_EXT_vertex_weighting,
GL_IBM_texture_mirrored_repeat, GL_KTX_buffer_region, GL_NV_blend_square,
GL_NV_evaluators, GL_NV_fence, GL_NV_fog_distance,
GL_NV_light_max_exponent, GL_NV_packed_depth_stencil,
GL_NV_register_combiners, GL_NV_texgen_emboss, GL_NV_texgen_reflection,
GL_NV_texture_env_combine4, GL_NV_texture_rectangle,
GL_NV_vertex_array_range, GL_NV_vertex_array_range2, GL_NV_vertex_program,
GL_NV_vertex_program1_1, GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap, GL_SGIS_multitexture,
GL_SGIS_texture_lod
glu version: 1.3
glu extensions:
GLU_EXT_nurbs_tessellator, GLU_EXT_object_space_tess

visual x bf lv rg d st colorbuffer ax dp st accumbuffer ms cav
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro r g b a bf th cl r g b a ns b eat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x21 16 tc 0 16 0 r y . 5 6 5 0 0 16 0 16 16 16 16 0 0 None
0x22 16 dc 0 16 0 r y . 5 6 5 0 0 16 0 16 16 16 16 0 0 None
0x23 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 16 0 16 16 16 16 0 0 None
0x24 16 dc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 16 0 16 16 16 16 0 0 None


Note that both under Windows and Linux I use the latest NVIDIA drivers that implement OpenGL 1.3.

So far I had nowhere any (unexplained) problems with 3d displays.

Fridger

I've also had problems with the DDS maps. First tried using Mars4K.DDS map to try it out. Did GO TO just after starting the program, then had a crash. Then tried going to another object first which was in jpg format, then went to Mars4K.DDS. This time it did not crash but was only at 2048X1024 resolution instead of 4K even when very close to Mars. I went into Photoshop, removed all the mip maps and saved a separate DDS file for all 3 subdirectories, 4k highres, 1k medres, 256 lowres. Now Mars does not load at all and the program just locks up. It seems that the DDS files have to be used as 1 file in the medres dir with mip maps. Only problem is you only get 2k resolution instead of 4k. Does anyone know why this is? I'm using GF2MX400 card. THANKS. Mark

Further studies of the crashes when loading .dds textures led to the following partial changes of my above report:

1) Both 4k and 8k textures work well with my 32MB Geforce 2 GTS card under Windows ME. The reason for the above reported crash under ME was that accidentally "CompressTexture true" was not commented out in solarsys.scc.

2) With the identical solarsys.scc as in Windows ME, both 4k and 8k .dds files continue to produce a SEGFAULT as reported above. So please, always specify whether you run Linux or ME when reporting success/failure of .dds texture loading.

3) I have downloaded NVIDIA's DXT-TOOLS for Windows, which allow to convert standard graphical formats to .dds in batch operation. So Photoshop is not needed! The generated .dds textures again work with Windows ME and crash under Linux.

Fridger