Celestia Forums

Hi all,
I have a Mars map at 23,040 x 11,520 Pixels it's absolutly stunning.

You have to download 3 greyscale images, one for each color channel,
then combine them to a color image usind a program such as Photoshop.
I found the links didn't work through my browser but copying and pasting the URL into Download Accelerator worked fine.

I resized the map to 16384 to use in Celestia (BTW fantastic prog, well done Chris and all that contribute) but it crashes. Using 8192 res now, looks good but can't seem to get Bump mapping working right at that resolution.


Download the three color channels from the URLs below.

WARNING: The combined image is about 760 Mb


Red channel:
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/textures/redmars_red.jpg =24.48 Mb

Green channel:
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/textures/redmars_grn.jpg =20.34 Mb

Blue channel:
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/textures/redmars_blu.jpg =16.48 Mb


Other maps of the solar system can be found at
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/


Andy

Andy wrote:
WARNING: The combined image is about 760 Mb

Have you smelt any ozone yet? Is there any smoke coming out of your computer? My god man...What kind of video card do you have?

I pity the poor fool with a 56K modem (like what I've got) who tries downloading those maps !

Anonymous wrote:I pity the poor fool with a 56K modem (like what I've got) who tries downloading those maps !

OK, so I'm a poor fool...but I'm a patient one .
I've only got a 56k modem. It's not a problem with a download manager, just drop the URLs in and get it over night.
I even got the 21k East and West Earth map this way. (OK, so they took a few nights. )
What is more important is to have plenty of ram and a good graphics card to view them.

Andy

I am missing the bumpmap file "Mars Topo" verry badly. They removed it due to server problems. BTW if they have combined r,g,b channels into single jpeg, its size with verry good quality would be not more than 30Mb.

I spent ages working out how to combine the three colour channels having never done it before in Photoshop or Gimp, but I got it sorted in the end. As the original poster stated, the image is hundreds of MB as a bitmap. I made a 16k x 8k texture of mars and saved it as a PNG almost 250MB in size. I'm looking for a way to compress it into a hardware-native format that works under linux. At that point I'll go out and buy a new GeForce card with 128MB (maybe even 256MB : ) of memory and watch in awe as I orbit photo-realistic planets and moons at an altitude of only a few hundred km. hehehehe : D

Yes, the raw-sizes are huge! At resolution about 1km/pixel, the Earth43k is somewhere 3GB and Mars23k is close to 800Mb. Ofcourse you can stretch them down and use DXTC or other hardware accelerated texture compression methods , and also buy GeForce10 . But texture quality is something to which we will never be satisfied enough and i think it is beyond purposes of Celestia. Generally we need a program-viewer that will load different smaller texture-tiles from disk in runtime, depending on the camera position, distance and pane-speed . Another exciting fish is using elevation maps to generate real surface geometry (displacement map?) instead of using ugly dot3 bump-maps.

I've been fiddling with the FXT1 tools from 3DFX but I can't get my textures converted to 32-bit TARGA using the Gimp. I'll try with Photoshop tomorrow and see if I have better luck. I wonder if there's any free, open source terrain-viewing software that can be adapted as a plugin to celestia, rather than forcing too many features into the celestia core. Full topographical rendering of landscapes would be way cool too.
(dreams of the day when desktop computers operate at 100t-flops with 10TB main memory and 1TB texture memory, allowing celestia to render the universe in 3D at 200FPS inside my very own holodeck : )

I don't think this it takes very long to come to that standard...
ATI will very soon (Radeon 9000) include Displacement mapping in their graphic boards, and we can simply use the bump maps as disp. maps.

The Radeon 9000 will also work optimally with 256 MB Video-RAM, so it will not take long till we have 512 MB and then 1 Gig, *dream*
With that (and texture compression) 1 km per pixel resolution will be definitely possible. Perhaps in a year or two...

:-)

Sirius

The current power is quite enough i think. It is just matter of optimal algorithm that will keep in memory only these parts of texture that are visible at the moment also depending of LOD. Ofcourse in this case the movement of camera will not be smooth at times (like going to another game-level )

Andy wrote:I even got the 21k East and West Earth map this way. (OK, so they took a few nights. )

Sound great. Where are they ?

ylr wrote:

Andy wrote:I even got the 21k East and West Earth map this way. (OK, so they took a few nights. :) )

Sound great. Where are they ?

Just move your eyes up to the top of this threat;) or enter in the Google search engine (use groups):

23040x11520 => BINGO

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:Just move your eyes up to the top of this threat;) or enter in the Google search engine (use groups):

23040x11520 => BINGO

Bye Fridger

Ah thanks but I was refering to the Earth textures. At 21k half the planet they look like killer textures.

ylr wrote:Ah thanks but I was refering to the Earth textures. At 21k half the planet they look like killer textures.

OK, these you get from the NASA BlueMarble server:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11656

But note, these textures have /NO/ sea ice (around the polar caps)!

See also
ftp://gloria2-f.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/stockli/

and have a look at readme.txt there.

These 21k x 21k files will kill you and your "Compi" anyway....

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:OK, these you get from the NASA BlueMarble server:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11656
But note, these textures have /NO/ sea ice (around the polar caps)!

See also
ftp://gloria2-f.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/stockli/
and have a look at readme.txt there.

NASA suspended anon ftp apparently. I can understand them. But I can always ask. Thanks for the link.

t00fri wrote:These 21k x 21k files will kill you and your "Compi" anyway....

On a PC that sure. But I have access to a DEC alpha sometime so it looks like an interressing thing to play with...