I need a Hires earth cloudmap

[JackCrow]

All I can say is...

If you have the hardware, 16k textures really rock.

WARNING: the picture linked below is large (~500K)

http://www.windyoaks.com/celestia/east_coast.jpg

My sysinfo:

Athlon XP 1800, 512 MB RAM, nVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 (128MBDDR), WinXP

I'm using phoenix's (thanks phoenix! ) 16k earth and 8k cloud textures.

The framerate is pretty poor (about 5fps), but once you get to a certain viewing spot... wow. Almost makes up for the fact I'll never see orbit.

[chris]

...is because a texture transform is used to make the cloud layer move...

Is that because you're using linear textures instead of swizzled textures for the clouds? If so, could you use a vertex shader to tweak the texture coordinates of the vertices instead of the "texture transform"?

Swizzling is just an optimization of hardware to improve locality of reference when sampling from a texture. It's something you have to think about when designing hardware or writing a driver, but not when creating an OpenGL or Direct3D application.

Vertex shaders won't help. The texture transformation is just a 4x4 matrix which the texture coordinates are multiplied by before being sent to the hardware's triangle setup engine. A vertex program is more flexible, permitting a non-affine texture transformation, but it won't help with the texture mapping problem. A possible workaround is to actually rotate the cloud layer geometry instead of just shifting the texture coordinates. However, since the cloud layer is relatively close to the planet surface, rotating the geometry could exacerbate "z-fighting" problems due to the limited precision of the depth buffer.

I'm taking a class on shaders this semester at school, so my knowledge is still very little. Just enough to be dangerous , but it's very interesting stuff. It's being taught by one of the guys on Microsoft's XBox performance team, so it focuses on nVidia hardware (as in the XBox). I'm hoping to delve deeper into Celestia's shader code if I can find some time away from school projects.

Celestia's shaders are stored in text files in the shaders directory, so they're very hackable. Have fun!

--Chris

[Jango Fett]

Nameless, could you write down instructions how to add bump map in cloud texture in Photoshop and solarsys.scc?

Thanks!

[Don. Edwards]

Hey all,
Well I have been playing with the old texture from Fridger and have had a try at some totaly new ones. I have had only slight success at bumpmaping the cloud textures. Its very easy to go to overboard on the bumpmaping and turn clouds into white mountian ranges. I have learned a little goes a long way. Well what I ended up doing was going back to the mother texture so to speak that Fridger used and then to go from there. I still wasn't happy with the results. After seeing what a few other users have done I got to thinking of a way to do this. So what I did was take Fridgers original bumpmaped cloud texture, enlarged it to 4096. Now this of course adds pixxelation to the clouds so I then gave it a lite blur effect.
Then I went to the mother texture from BlueMarble. I used The GIMP to make it a proper cloud-map. I reduced its size from 8192x4096 to 4096x2048. Now I have noticed that a few people that have bumpmaped the clouds have failed to keep them from going semi-transparent. Lets face it, clouds are not tranparent. So when I went to bumpmap then I used the compesate for darkness feature and that helped keep the clouds nice and bright. I only did a very mild bumpmaping. I then saved the texture as a .png. I then moved to Photoshop were I had Fridger's cloud-map already opened and resized. I loaded up the new texture and then copy and pasted it onto Fridger's. the reason I did this was to maintain the light blue hue he put in the clouds but it doesn't seem apearent in the final outcome. Now I made the new cloud layer semi-tranparent to about 80%. The whole reason to even past the new cloud texture over theold one is to reintroduce the lost detail. I then merged the layers and I didn't think I liked what I saw. The texture took on a quite gray color and I figured I just lost all the clouds briliace and whiteness. But I thought I would go ahead and see what it looked like. To my suprise the gray didn't even show up at all and the texture looked fantastic. I still need to tweak it here and there but I think its a done deal. Here are a couple of shots for your gandering.

The second one has a few cyclonic storms added to the tropical regions.

I also put a little movie together so you can an idea of what it would look like in motion. You will need the DIVx 5 plugin to view it. http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/newclouds1.avi
I should have the basic 4k cloud texture ready by Friday night in both .dds and .png format. And for thoughs of you that rebumpmaped the other textures I would like to know what you used to do it and the settings you used. If you guys want great textures from the rest of us you have to share your technics in these areas. You may have the missing link to my problem.
Don

[Jango Fett]

It's amazing!

Please put it somewhere for download when you're done with it, pleeeaaassee!

[Guest]

Here's how i bumpmap clouds in gimp:
Before doin the bump filter do an edit-> copy of the map.
now apply the bumpmap filter doing a far amount of 'bumping' so you end up with quite a dark bump mapped cloud picture. Now i paste the original that i copied before i started the bumping over this. This gets the bright white colour back and smooths any excessively sharp points(or mountain tips) and makes the clouds alot denser(less transparent).

Although, i forgot to mention when you apply alot of bumping you tend to get alot of pixelated artefacts in the supposedly clear areas of the map -well on blue marbles anyway.These clear or transparent areas have some nearly invisble cloud bits in them which the bump filter pics out really well unfortunately.

To compensate for this i open the original blue marble texture in grayscale and invert the colours. Next i select the magic wand(select contiguous regions) tool. I click this on some of the big white areas and cut them out, then invert the colours again and save the map. Then you can go ahead and bumpmap as above.

Don, after reading your above post i mapped some bumped clouds onto fridgers blue background. I isolated the background by doing a layers->alpha to selection and then cutting out the selection. You're left with just the blue background with holes where clouds that i had prebumped as above pasted into very nicely. It turned out quite well except there were no hurricanes! Give it a try.
Could you also post a close up of your clouds-thanks
Small Sample

[Don. Edwards]

It sounds like we nearly did the same thing but from diferent directions.
As for the blue coloring, it realy doesn't show up that much anyway and it is in there baried in the layer. I am going to try a few more tricks and see how al this turns out. If you look close in the pictures I posted there is just a hint of shading in some of the clouds. I definetly do not want to loose that look. I have already created a .dds of this cloud-map. So I will be playing with it more tonight but not to much. I caught a cold over the weekend so sitting at the computer hours on end isn't very appealing tonight. But I will work at it a little with the textures and post back my results.

Jango Fett,
I promise I will have the cloud-map in both .dds and .png ready for download by Friday night. Thats the top one not the one with the cyclonic storms added. I was looking over the texture again and I have to make sure that the storms are spining in the right direction for there position above and below the equator. Storms north the equator spin counter or anti clockwise while storms south of the equator spin clockwise. I have to get it right now don't I. I will all posted as to how things progress.
Don.

[Don. Edwards]

Well It seems the post I made earlier didn't go through. I think I closed the window before I hit post. Oh well lets try this again.
Here is another shot of the cloud-map texture in the previuos screencaps. This one shows off some of the shading in the lower cloud decks. Its shubtle but is there.


I have come across a problem though an it seems to have gotten worse with all the bumpmaping and shading going on. The faint seem that is in the main base black&white texture is really getting pronounced in these new textures. I think I am going to have to scrap the above textures in favor of new cleaner ones based on a cleaned up mother texture. I am going to blend the ends better so the seem goes away for the most part and start this whole thing over. I will not be using Fridger's cloud texture as a base anylonger as it has the same seem in it and it will get past on to any new texture that is based on it. Because that texture is transparent its nearly imposible to do any real clean up of it. So I need to go back to the begining. This is probably going to blow my promise of a friday release.
If you guys want the above texture to play with I will make it available but you will have to live with the nasty seem that it has. Here is a shot.

I now it doesn't look to bad but when you see it at an angle it shows up pretty good. As I said if you guys want it I will post it as is and you can play with it until I get the new one finished. Let me know what you think or want.
Don.

[nameless]

Here are some pics of my new cloud texture





1000km and still not looking too bad!










sorry to post so many but i couldnt choose between them
as for sending your texture don i for one will wait till you have it perfected

[Don. Edwards]

Well I guess I was pretty out of it last night because I mispelled SEAM In my image.
Anyway the above texture is fixed. The seam is gone. I might even have it ready tonight but no promises. I am still working on another texture from scratch and it comming along ok. Just thought I would drop a line on how things were progressing.

[billybob884]

whats this new texture for?

[Don. Edwards]

Its a new 4k Cloud-Map texture for Earth or any earth like planet you want to use it with. Check the new section "Yet Another New Earth Cloud Map Texture"

[Don. Edwards]

Hey Anonymous and nameless,
When you guys are bumpmaping with GIMP are using the "Compensate for Darkening" switch on your textures. I have noticed that either they look a tad darker than normal or they look as though they shifted to a more transparent state. If you don't use the Compenate switch this occurs. Just thought I would point that out if you hadden't already figured that out. another way to make then brighter and les transparent would be to use GIMP's Brightness and contrast controls. You souldn't loose the bumpmaped effect.