Celestia Forums

Bruckner will display in a little while some new experiments I made with combining hires bumpmapping and specular reflections (ice, water) in one DXT3 [4:1] dds file.

The texture manipulations were all done with GIMP the standard image manipulation program under Linux that is also freely available under Windows.

http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia.html

Bye Fridger

And they look gorgeous: http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia_gallery.html

Take care!

Bruckner

You may want to try these links...

Gimp for Windows: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/
Gimp for Linux (THE Gimp, always a step beyond...): http://www.gimp.org

As previously said -- take care.

Bruckner

I have been doing some experiments too with making dds with the NVidia photoshop plugin (thanks for the hint!), but found that still specular reflections can not be combined with dynamic bumpmapping (i.e., changing shadows depending on where the sun is), is that correct? Or does your dds do this Fridger?

Buzz wrote:I have been doing some experiments too with making dds with the NVidia photoshop plugin (thanks for the hint!), but found that still specular reflections can not be combined with dynamic bumpmapping (i.e., changing shadows depending on where the sun is), is that correct? Or does your dds do this Fridger?

Celestia 1.2.4 cannot do dynamic bumpmapping and specular reflections simultaneously. I'm fixing this in 1.2.5, though I'm not sure how it will perform on anything less than a GeForce3.

--Chris

I'd rather have the dynamic bumpmaps anyway. Are these available for general use anywhere? (The screenshots are gorgeous, BTW.)
Thanks. Ron A

guest wrote:I'd rather have the dynamic bumpmaps anyway. Are these available for general use anywhere? (The screenshots are gorgeous, BTW.)
Thanks. Ron A

It is quite clear that my 'static' bumpmaps represent a compromise until dynamic hires bumpmapping works jointly with specular reflections. However, I wanted to illustrate with the images at Bruckner's that this compromise gives a surprising and economical improvement at this time. Moreover, the images are meant as an encouragement to everyone to try these techniques, e.g. by means of Gimp. It is great fun to experiment, and provides substantial know how in image manipulation techniques that may well be very useful in other domains...

Since my site is reserved for professional issues, and the download/storage capacity at Bruckner's site is also limited the download issue of my textures is still not solved satisfactorily. They comprise altogether about 200 MB, with earth.dds from my latest images being 44.7 MB due to DDXT3 (4:1) compression only.

Bye Fridger