Celestia Forums

I am getting bored.There were lots of new pictures of Rhea,Enceladus,Iapetus and no update in the textures.
t00fri,the weekend had passed and no Iapetus texture.I thought that the texture was almost ready...
The Titan new texture was OK,but the problem is many places has ultra low resolution.Only Xanadu and surrondings has a texture between 2k and 4k.It is very frustrating.
In the case of Iapetus,I think a 4k texture(or better 2k texture) could be done for the entire moon.
And what about Phoebe?There is enough material to at least a 1k texture of this moon...

danielj wrote:I am getting bored.

Seems you are well informed and if you are so bored, a good occupation can be... working on this yourself !! (or do you prefer waiting for others to do it? )

Ps: I suppose you know that Fridger plan to make a "how to" for cylindrical maps... If not, see:
http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6860

danielj wrote:I am getting bored.There were lots of new pictures of Rhea,Enceladus,Iapetus and no update in the textures.
t00fri,the weekend had passed and no Iapetus texture.I thought that the texture was almost ready...
The Titan new texture was OK,but the problem is many places has ultra low resolution.Only Xanadu and surrondings has a texture between 2k and 4k.It is very frustrating.
In the case of Iapetus,I think a 4k texture(or better 2k texture) could be done for the entire moon.
And what about Phoebe?There is enough material to at least a 1k texture of this moon...

Could one of my American friends tell this guy in "polite" English words that he chose the wrong tone with me? If I do it, I am afraid, it will be the straight European way, which might offend some people's taste .


Danielj,

1) my 2k Iapetus texture is available for download since almost a week. Unfortunately, I just discovered that I must have forgotten to actually upload it to the TextureFoundry!

2) I have incorporated all publicly available Titan maps. It's of course NOT my fault that some regions have not yet been mapped the way you'd prefer it .

3) Indeed, since Celestia development has been stagnating for many weeks, I can also find a more inspiring use of my weekends than making Saturn moon textures for YOU, dear Danielj!

Bye Fridger

Indeed, since Celestia development has been stagnating for many weeks

Which is a bit of a problem in itself really. I realise that Chris has other things to do besides work on Celestia, but it's been quite a while since we've heard any news of development of a newer version of Celestia. New textures are all well and good and useful, but I thought there were a lot of exciting new ideas for the implementation of the program itself that were in the pipeline (the multiple lightsource rendering that we currently have being a taster of things to come).

So are things slowing down now? Will it be many more months before the next prerelease (or even final version of 1.4.0?). Is there any news of what else is in the pipeline or what timescale things will be worked on?

I wasn??t only talking to you,Fridger,but to everyone.
So,now I understand.It??s Motherlode??s fault...

danielj wrote:I wasn??t only talking to you,Fridger,but to everyone.
So,now I understand.It??s Motherlode??s fault...

What does ML have to do with this??

Bye Fridger

Sorry,I was misunderstood.
Kikinho??s addon takes a long time to appear in Motherlode and then I generalized

danielj wrote:I am getting bored.There were lots of new pictures of Rhea,Enceladus,Iapetus and no update in the textures.
t00fri,the weekend had passed and no Iapetus texture.I thought that the texture was almost ready...
The Titan new texture was OK,but the problem is many places has ultra low resolution.Only Xanadu and surrondings has a texture between 2k and 4k.It is very frustrating.
In the case of Iapetus,I think a 4k texture(or better 2k texture) could be done for the entire moon.
And what about Phoebe?There is enough material to at least a 1k texture of this moon...

I'll say what I said before: Steve Albers is the go-to guy here. He's shoveling out the free candy at an amazing rate. The only thing preventing his Saturn moon textures from being used in Celestia is that they're offset by 180 degrees in longitude, so you have to fix that in an image editor (which is not hard) or edit solarsys.ssc to compensate. Most of them are 2k, but in most cases that's appropriate for what we have from Cassini anyway. His Iapetus is a marvel; I think all it's missing is some of the Saturn-shine images of the "Eye" crater, which would be harder to incorporate.

Phoebe's a hard case because it's so non-spherical-- conventional map projection software won't do the job. You need somebody like Phil Stooke to handle it, and I think he's busy with other things. So there may be a wait.

As for the lack of high-res coverage of most of Titan, that's because the pictures simply don't exist yet. I suppose somebody could try incorporating the few radar swaths of the northern reaches into a Titan map, but the detailed infrared imagery has been limited to the area that is sunlit during the various close Titan encounters, which so far has always been nearly the same. Have patience-- things will be different this year, starting with the flyby at the end of March.

Matt McIrvin wrote:
....
I'll say what I said before: Steve Albers is the go-to guy here. He's shoveling out the free candy at an amazing rate.
....

Matt,

don't you think that I must have had good reasons to start all over again from scratch with my 4k Titan update and a fresh 2k Iapetus texture, despite Steve's textures being already available on his site... . Certainly not just to keep myself busy for many hours or to incorporate the missing 180 degree offset...

Too bad, however, that I simply forgot to upload my final 2k Iapetus, although the package including bump and spec maps, was ready since February 16 already. (The white ice regions require a spec map since their reflectivity has been measured >60%).

As of today, my 2k Iapetus texture package may be downloaded from here:

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/iapetus.zip

On February 13, I have posted a reduced 800x400 preview that may be compared with Steves Iapetus texture, e.g. wrto accuracy and smoothness of texture matching, non-linear distortions during cylindrical projection, matching of coloration to 'natural color' imaging etc...

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6663&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

My raw texture input data were precisely specified here
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6663&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Unlike Steve's 2k Titan texture (that bases in part on my earlier one) my latest 4k Titan incorporates /all/ new high-res (8k) and medium-res (global) data from the Feb 15 flyby. Notably, it includes available visual data of the region around the 'crater' feature that was rediscovered by the Feb 15 radar scan. In addition, it includes the highest available resolution for and optimal adjustment of the Huygens landing site texture. Special emphasis was placed on avoiding /non-linear/ distortions during cylindrical projection...

My Titan preview is here

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6836&start=0

and the download URL of the final package was given here

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6836&start=6


Bye Fridger

Matt McIrvin wrote:As for the lack of high-res coverage of most of Titan, that's because the pictures simply don't exist yet.
...

...as was said further up already:

t00fri wrote:2) I have incorporated all publicly available Titan maps. It's of course NOT my fault that some regions have not yet been mapped the way you'd prefer it .

Bye Fridger

What Texture Foundry are you talking about?
The same that isn??t updated since 2003?I wonder if it is a new site...

danielj wrote:What Texture Foundry are you talking about?
The same that isn??t updated since 2003?I wonder if it is a new site...

It is effectively the same site, yet it's a (slightly) different URL on Chris' machine. There I have posted all material that I produced during the last years outside development work for the main Celestia distribution. Eg. location files, binary orbit data, textures, ...

Bye Fridger

Fridger - I should point out that your WWW link under your messages points to your work webpage (which has no celestia-related links on it), not to your Texture Foundry - surely pointing to the latter would be more useful for people here?

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Fridger - I should point out that your WWW link under your messages points to your work webpage (which has no celestia-related links on it), not to your Texture Foundry - surely pointing to the latter would be more useful for people here?

Contrary to my original offer, my TextureFoundry /WEBsite/
will not be revived/updated. The reasons have been widely discussed, as you will remember... In fact, that URL is not really the place where I made work of mine available for download during the last few years. It is an FTP-dir 'close by' however .

t00fri wrote:Contrary to my original offer, my TextureFoundry /WEBsite/
will not be revived/updated. The reasons have been widely discussed, as you will remember... In fact, that URL is not really the place where I made work of mine available for download during the last few years. It is an FTP-dir 'close by' however .

So why not have your WWW link point to whatever site or FTP Directory you are currently using to make your files available?