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My Latest & Best Titan Texture for Download, NOW

Posted: 13.03.2005, 17:04
by t00fri
March, 13. 2005

Hi all,

This is by far my best, most detailed and most accurate Titan surface texture to date.

It incorporates all the hi-res global imaging information from Cassini's flybys over the past year, both as it approached the Saturn system and during three closer flybys in July, October and December 2004.

As raw resource for my texture served the very recently published 4256x1744 summary mosaic from

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06201

Of particular interest is the vast amount of new imaging data in the south polar regions, with a wealth of long 'river-beds', drainage channels, clouds etc. visible.

In addition, my texture incorporates all six recent close-up mosaics of Titan's surface. They are each composed of many images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft during flybys in October (see PIA06158) and December (see PIA06159) of 2004. The close-ups also include a most detailed mosaic of the Huygens landing site and its environment.

The raw sources were published here
just a few days ago,

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06204

My new Titan map has state of the art accuracy, since the cylindrical projection work was done by the Cyclops imaging group, which certainly has more information than we do...

The composition of these various official imaging resources
required a lot of careful tuning work for a pleasing display in
Celestia, such as smoothing and blending all transition boundaries, rescaling, locating and blending in the six close-up layers etc.

As one illustration, a 'raw' close-up (top) and my final input layer for my new texture (bottom).

Image

Finally, as in my previous Titan textures, coloration was done entirely by computer, using the familiar 'natural color' photo from the Huygens landing site as a color template

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1310


Here is a 'tiny' 800x400 reduction of my new 4k cylindrical surface texture map. Unlike the original, I added an offset by width/2 to make the Xanadu region with all the hires features appear in the image center.

Image

Next, two global views of the new texture 'in action' from two different perspectives! Note the amazing 'long river beds' in the southern hemisphere!

Image

Finally, an illustration of the amazing amount of detail visible due to the new close-ups I have included. The top image is the Huygens landing site with its environment!

Image

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Here is the URL, on my TextureFoundry site for downloading
the new ZIP archive (6.7 MB)

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/titan-march05.zip

************************************************
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Installation:
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My Titan texture provides a 4k view of Titan's surface. The thick orange haze layer is to be taken from the official Celestia distribution. It is not contained in the present package.

Just unzip the present titan-march05.zip archive in your 'extras' folder. Your default texture of Titan will then be modified automatically.


Enjoy,

Bye Fridger

Posted: 13.03.2005, 17:41
by Bob Hegwood
Fridger,

Just wanted to thank you for this beautiful texture. I'll have to reduce it a
bit in order to use it on my machine, but it's far better than any other
Titan texture I've seen.

Again, thanks very much for the beautiful texture and your hard work.

Take care, Bob

Posted: 13.03.2005, 22:19
by ElChristou
Tx Fridger, this is amazing...

Titan

Posted: 13.03.2005, 22:29
by Beowulf01
WOW!!!!
damm nice.. I see you put a LOT of work into that.

Re: My Latest & Best Titan Texture for Download, NOW

Posted: 14.03.2005, 00:18
by rthorvald
t00fri wrote:Just unzip the present titan-march05.zip archive in your 'extras' folder

Beautiful work, again. Thanks!
It is rather fascinating to experience Titan "appearing" gradually, like this... Sort of like fog lifting...

-rthorvald

Posted: 14.03.2005, 04:39
by Don. Edwards
Well I like and I am going to use it.
Nice work fridger. :wink:

Don. Edwards

Posted: 14.03.2005, 11:27
by TERRIER
Fidger,

Thanks for the updated texture.

I'd like to say that the opportunity for me to use Celestia to see the emerging features on Titan is very much appreciated.

Posted: 14.03.2005, 19:40
by t00fri
Thanks everybody for your encouragement...

Bye Fridger

Posted: 14.03.2005, 20:33
by t00fri
Bye the way...

If people want to experiment a bit with a nice Titan bump-map, and some specular illumination ...just let me know. I can always upload my 'titan-bump.png' and corresponding *.ssc 'sniplet'.

Although not supported scientifically, Titan looks graphically much more 'dynamical', i.e. simply much better ;-). 3d needs light and shadow!

Bye Fridger

Posted: 14.03.2005, 20:58
by ElChristou
Hey, for sure !!
What kind of question is this ?? :wink:

Posted: 14.03.2005, 22:30
by julesstoop
Thanks Fridger!

I've actually superimposed the famous mosaic from Huygens descent in your texture. It worked, but the mosaic ended up being about 35 by 35 pixels large...
Still amazing that the amount of detail in the 4k texture even allowed me to do this.

Posted: 14.03.2005, 23:34
by t00fri
julesstoop wrote:Thanks Fridger!

I've actually superimposed the famous mosaic from Huygens
descent in your texture. It worked, but the mosaic ended up
being about 35 by 35 pixels large...
Still amazing that the amount of detail in the 4k texture even
allowed me to do this.


Julesstoop,

thanks for pointing this out. I can confirm the ~35x35 pixel
offset relative to

Image

The best reading at high magnification of the center of the
'red landing circle' gives

Code: Select all

long = -191.944 degrees
lat   = -10.944 degrees


If I correct Jestr's Huygens landing site in Celestia to these
values, I am ending up about 35 pixels too far north and 35
pixels too far west compared to the red circle.


On the other hand, the uncertainty of matching the recently
published close-up of the landing site to the Cyclops group's
base alignment was at best a few pixels. So I conclude, they
must have done some 'tweaking' in their recent official image
releases.

Unlike my previous textures, this time I assumed their
authority as to the alignment...

Bye Fridger

hey

Posted: 16.03.2005, 06:12
by Scorpiove
Very nice work, I'm deffinately going to use this texture. Much appreciated!

Posted: 16.03.2005, 11:37
by PlutonianEmpire
I eagerly await the day Titan is finally fully mapped, and the final texture map appearing on Celestia--I just LOVE trying "terraforming experiments" on all kinds of worlds... :D :)

I've downloaded it, but I'm gonna need to halve it's pixel size to run on my computer.

Posted: 20.03.2005, 19:56
by NeilF
I've done as you've said, and unzipped it into my celestia/extras/ folder and I do not get the updated image of Titan :(

I now have...

extras\
textures\
medres\
titan.png
readme
titan.ssc


I run Celestia and don't get it... Any clue?

I'm a novice to this...

Posted: 20.03.2005, 20:21
by t00fri
NeilF wrote:I've done as you've said, and unzipped it into my celestia/extras/ folder and I do not get the updated image of Titan :(

I now have...

extras\
textures\
medres\
titan.png
readme
titan.ssc


I run Celestia and don't get it... Any clue?

I'm a novice to this...


Now since you are a novice, let me ask you a stupid question back:

Perhaps it all worked and you did not notice? What do you see when going to Titan? Did you push the 'I'-key in order to get rid of the yellow haze??

Where is actually the 'titan' directory that was at the top of my archive? You certainly did more than just unzipping my archive in 'extras' as I said in the instructions...

Bye Fridger

Posted: 20.03.2005, 20:22
by selden
It looks like you told unZip to restore the files all into the same directory (folder) rather than letting it restore the folders nested inside one another as they're stored within the Zip file.

They should be

Celestia\extras\titan.ssc
so titan.ssc is inside extras,

and

Celestia\extras\textures\medres\titan.png
so titan.png is inside medres is inside textures is inside extras.

Posted: 20.03.2005, 20:23
by essee
Try Celestia/extras/addons/titan
Create a folder called titan in which the titan.ssc and readme files reside along with the textures folder. Inside the textures folder place the medres folder. Inside the medres folder place the titan.png. Place this new titan folder into extras/addons and it should work perfect. Yet another beautiful addon from a most creative author...

Posted: 20.03.2005, 22:34
by DaveMc
Fridger's new Titan texture is soo good (thanks Fridger!) why even mess with making it an addon? Just put the texture in the Celestia\textures\medres folder, edit the solarsys.ssc file, and have it be the default Titan. Or add it as an alternate texture. My graphics card isn't the best (ATI Radoen VE 7000, 64 MB RAM) so this way also means one less addon to bog things down.

Just my $.02
Dave

Posted: 21.03.2005, 00:49
by t00fri
DaveMc wrote:Fridger's new Titan texture is soo good (thanks Fridger!) why even mess with making it an addon? Just put the texture in the Celestia\textures\medres folder, edit the solarsys.ssc file, and have it be the default Titan. Or add it as an alternate texture. My graphics card isn't the best (ATI Radoen VE 7000, 64 MB RAM) so this way also means one less addon to bog things down.

Just my $.02
Dave


This version will replace my previous one of the Celestia 1.3.2 distribution in the forthcoming Celestia 1.4.0. However, by default, we usually reduce the textures in size, in order not to make the official archive too 'heavy'. So it will again be a 1k reduction of the present 4k texture.

I was convinced by forum users to pack my 4k Titan texture as an add-on, since -- so people argued-- Newbies can most easily install it this way!

Apparently this was NOT the case in ONE exception above ;-) .

Bye Fridger