Celestia Forums

How do I enable bumpmap in Celestia??

You don't need to post the same question in 2 different forums...

Try pressing Ctrl + V a few times. If you can't see it, you probably don't have the right card. You need a Geforce 2 or newer, or one of the fairly recent ATI cards to see bump/specular maps. If bumpmapping doesn't work you probably won't be able to see any of the otehr eye candy features either...

sorry, wont happen again.
I'll try it.
BTW :I have a GeForce4 Ti...

Anonymous Guest,

You should also tell us what you're trying to do with bumpmaps and which version of Celestia you are running.

Bumpmaps are completely broken in Celestia v1.3.0. Most people who use the forum probably have forgotten this because most of us are running a recent prerelease of v1.3.1. That was one of the first bugs fixed.

Prereleases are available at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/

Does this help?

First of all, I'm new to this program...
I want to give earth a more realistic look.
I was runing version 1.3.0 and now I have downloaded version 1.3.1pre11.
Still no bumpmapping. Do I have to download extra textures? And do I have to change anything in the solarsys.ssc file?
Thx for the help!

Cereb,

Yes, you have to edit solarsys.ssc.
Remove the comment character (#) from in front of the lines


I'd suggest putting your grey-scale image in the folder \textures\hires\, not necessarily because it's high resolution, but just so that you can find it easily.

Added later:

Sorry: I overlooked your other question.
Yes, you do have to provide a greyscale bumpmap image for the Earth. Celestia doesn't include one.

One is available at
http://exp.arc.nasa.gov/downloads/celestia/textures/medres/
There are others, of course.

Most recently, "virtual textures" have become possible in pre11, which allow much higher resolution images. Search the forum for discussions of them.

If you create your own bumpmaps from other sources, on't forget to make sure your bumpmap images are a power of two on a side. E.g. 1024x512 or 4096x2048. This is one of Celestia's requirements.

Does this help?

It works fine now, thx!