Celestia Forums

Hi all,

after we have all enjoyed the recent Titan landing photos, I
thought it might be about time to get into an iteration of a
much improved Titan surface texture for Celestia!

My updated 2k texture is based entirely on published
ESA/NASA imaging, since I found some disagreements with
the position of the landing site in Steve Albers' texture.

Here you see how it looks in Celestia:



Here are the ingedients:

1) The best available lowres cylindric Titan map at about
11.2 Km/pix resolution

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1182
Reduced by a factor 2, that's how the original looks like:



This is quite a bit better than my default texture for Celestia 1.3.2.

2) The recent hires view of Titan at 2-4 km/pixel centered at lat = -15 deg, long = 156 deg west.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1179
Reduced by a factor of 4, it looks like this:

I then used the great mmps projection program from Matthew Arcus
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~arcus/mmps/
to generate a cylindrical projection centered around (lat,long) = (-15deg, 156 deg W)
from the above photo.

3) The positioning of the hires view was carefully matched to
the most recent coordinates of the /actual/ Huygens landing site from



The lower resolution global map layer was then adjusted to
best matching with the hires one.

4) The mosaic borders of the resulting texture were then
smothed and matched in brightness & contrast.
Also the various colored lines from the original were
removed.

5) Finally the texture was colorized by mapping the recent
surface color photo onto the grayscale texture.


You may download my new surface texture here. I used PNG
format to allow lossless modifications according to your
taste...There is a host of conversion programs around, if you
prefer another format.

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/titan-new2k.png

Note that my Titan cloud texture from Celestia 1.3.2 remains
unmodified. It is somewhat more yellowish than the orange
surface color according to the recent Huygens photo. I think
this is not unplausible and there are no reasons for applying
any corrections so far.

Enjoy,
Bye Fridger

Nice work Fridger,Jestr

jestr wrote:Nice work Fridger,Jestr

Jestr,

Thanks. In fact, after I did all these careful corrections, it turns
out that your add-on's landing site matches the actual landing
location surprisingly well!

Bye Fridger

Yes, quite nice! Now, is this THE texture, so to speak, or do you have a cloud map texture to overlay it?

Oh, is this texture publically available yet, or are you still working on it?

...John...

Dollan wrote:Yes, quite nice! Now, is this THE texture, so to
speak, or do you have a cloud map texture to overlay it?

Oh, is this texture publically available yet, or are you still working on
it?

...John...

John,

yes, I am still working on it, but people are welcome to download and
test it already. Yes it will become the updated default texture for the
next Celestia distribution (probably reduced to 1k). It will replace
eventually my present Titan surface texture in Celestia. As I wrote
above, my cloud texture being already part of Celestia 1.3.2, is still
satisfactory. So, yes, a cloud texture exists to go together with the
surface texture. After toggling the I-key the surface texture is
displayed as usual.

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:You may download my new surface texture here. I used PNG
format to allow lossless modifications according to your
taste...There is a host of conversion programs around, if you
prefer another format.

Fridger,

Thanks very much for making your excellent work available. But I must point out that conversion programs generally can be applied only after the file is downloaded, so they don't help those who prefer a lossy compression format in order to reduce their download time (and load on shatters.net).

- Hank

This is weird, I'm getting a strange blue haze around titan that isnt in your picture. Heres the the Titan part in solarsys.ssc:



Is anything wrong? I might have accidently changed something so its probably just my own fault Other than this haze the texture is great, since the haze isnt even part of the texture, its there no matter what texture i put on Titan.

It would be the Hazecolor and hazedensity bit doing that. Taking that out those should help.

Michael Kilderry

hank wrote:

t00fri wrote:You may download my new surface texture here. I used PNG
format to allow lossless modifications according to your
taste...There is a host of conversion programs around, if you
prefer another format.

Fridger,

Thanks very much for making your excellent work available. But I
must point out that conversion programs generally can be applied only
after the file is downloaded, so they don't help those who prefer a
lossy compression format in order to reduce their download time (and
load on shatters.net).

- Hank

Hank,

that's a good point. Since I have such a fast line now, I completely
forgot about download times . I shall upload a JPEG version of my
texture tonight when I get home.

Bye Fridger

Hi all,

as promised, here is the possibility to download my actual Titan
surface texture as JPG, for people who want to economize on
the download time. Note that this format is not lossless. For
people who intend to apply significant changes, I
recommend to download the lossless PNG format of my
texture.

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/titan-new2k.jpg
Enjoy,

Bye Fridger

Alright thanks, I figured it had something to do with that, I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be there all together heh. Thanks.

I would like to say that t00fri has done a brilliant job on that texture.

but, i was thinking until we get more data could someone make an imaginary version based on current data and fill the gaps so it looks nice and complete, like that artists impression of sedna.

David