Earth 18,000 BCE - A Work In Progress! - Nah it is finished!

[DJ_Night]

wonderful , this great project is back up again, thumbs up Mr.Edwards, keep up the good and appreciated work,

offtopic>> as someone else said in the other topic, there are alot of people that has been following almost all the topics in this forum for ages without even posting once, I could at least name over 200 here in stockhollm/sweden that are so called invisible guest viewers on this forum, a lot of universitys, a very helpful and informative place, its a shame to leave such great and impessive projects to dust or for personal use, please share your good work,

cheers,

[Brendan]

Thanks for fixing the northeast. The idea of making a 65 mya earth texture should be interesting to try out because you would be developing techniques for moving the land around. And I guess that extending the northern part of India, that got squished into mountains, would be done in a way similar to how the coasts were extended in the ice age texture. And of course, some mountain ranges would need to be reduced or erased. And others would be changed to look higher like the Urals and those in the east of North America.
Then the techniques could be used again to make more earth textures like ones at the beginning and end of the Paleozoic era.

Brendan

[Don. Edwards]

Well the Earth 18000BCE texture is nearing its end. Meaning it is nearly finished. So of course I have to show off some new pictures of what it looks like as of now. So here is a bakers dozen of them for your perusal.



























I have nearly locked in the colors as to how it will look in the final version.
As you can see I have added some shallow water coloring in the oceans and larger bodies of water. Also Europe has finally been fixed and the Black and Caspian seas have been put back. I also added the Aral Sea and the northern Per/Mensi lakes. The texture is far from perfect and some creative guessing has had to be done here and there but I feel it will definitely be a good representation of the Earth at this time in its history. Unfortunately it will only be a 4k texture. This is probably the most work I have ever done on a 4k so far. But even at 4k the detail is pretty good and it should be fun for some to pop it in and have a look at it. I feel it should be fully finished next week. I still have some adjusting of some of the bodies of water and I have to adjust the secmap so it matches the texture right. So keep an eye here for word of the download.

Don. Edwards

[Brendan]

Wow it looks good. What image file format(s) will you be making it available in?
I can see textures only up to 2k unless I turn them into virtual textures. I could do that with jpg files, but I still havn't done that with dds files. I'll better set up something to do that.

Brendan

[jamarsa]

Congratulations, Don!! Excellent work, as always...

I'm glad that you kept working on this.

[Darkmiss]

Great colouring
Looking forward to this Don

[fsgregs]

Don, this in phenomenal work. Thank you so much for it. I start teaching the Ice Ages to my Earth Science students in two months. I MUST use these textures. IN fact, if you complete them in time, I will work up a complete Celestia Educational Activity for them, and share it with everyone on the forum and beyond. Teachers everywhere would love to have this resource!

Please finish and post them soon.

Frank G

[Don. Edwards]

Well Earth 18,000 BCE is finished. Well the main texture is ready. But I still have to update the bump and spec maps. If all goes well it will be up for download this weekend. Than I can finally put this aside and concentrate on the Realistic Earth 32K texture. I adapted the ocean/water coloring from the 32k texture so it is a close match. The land mass colors are a little different than the 32k texture though. This is because this texture was based on Mario's Earth 1 texture from Space-Graphic.com and not on the Blue-Marble textures. Although I did my best to bring the coloring in line with my other textures it has a look and feel of its own. So here are some parting shot of the texture being rendered in Celestia. Enjoy!

Texture true coloring in Celestia no effects on.


Same as above but with Specular lighting on.


Same as above but with atmospheric haze added


Same as above with cloud layer on.


Europe and Africa in true color no effects mode.


Indo/Asia and Australia.


Antarctic Ice sheet.


Arctic Ice sheet.


Close-up of North America.


The Baring Land bridge.


Europe and Siberia.


Well that does it with the pictures. I may post just a few more with the modified bump and specmaps.
BTW if you notice that there is some blurring on the texture that is because this texture is only a 4k texture. I didn't have the resources for a larger version when I started it. I may in the future make a larger 8k version but I make no promises on that. As always any comments are welcome.

Don. Edwards

P.S.
Frank if you read this I hope its done in time for your class. By what you wrote above I figured you would need it by December or early January. I hope this gives you the time you need to write up your activity.

[fsgregs]

Dear Don:

WOW WOW

The ice caps on the poles are ENORMOUS!!! I had seen maps of such, but not until Celestia could I appreciate it (maybe I'm biased). Anyway, I will not be covering the ice ages until January so there is plenty of time. I will not only use this as part of my lecture, but will work up an educational activity using it, perhaps in combination with the continental drift activity that I also just found on the forum.

Thanks to all of you for these great add-ons. I have over 180 students who are thoroughly enjoying them. As an aside, I urge you to visit my site and take some of the Activity journeys I am posting there. I have 3 posted so far, with the other 4 coming soon (as I put the add-ons together).

Don, thanks again for this great work. Can't wait to download your 32k Earth.

[Don. Edwards]

Well two more shots showing the new normalmap.






The normalmap really helps to see just how high the ice sheets really were.

The specmap through me a curve so I have to do a little work on it yet. But everything is a go for a weekend release.

Don. Edwards

[TERRIER]

Don

This texture is looking terrific, and the normal map certainly gives all that ice a sense of great depth. As well as those massive ice sheets, the texture really does highlight rather well, the areas of exposed land that we don't see at the current time. Or be it, areas not covered by the ice sheet!
I see that, unfortunately, the British 'Isles' are almost entirely covered, but what can be seen looks interesting, I'm just wondering what they'd look like under all that ice? And also the two large oval shaped areas of exposed sea to the east of the British Isles are very intrigueing, it'd be nice to know what is the cause of this feature?

Frank

I've just found that continental drift download on maxims site when I was downloading his impact crater locations file. I don't know if it's been announced on the forum ?, but if it hasn't, then maybe it should be, because it is rather cool

regards
TERRIER

[fsgregs]

Terrier:

Thanks. I have the add-on. It is very impressive. I will be using Continental drift as a moving animation on my classroom overhead monitors (I have 2 35" big monitors mounted in my classroom).

Frank

[Don. Edwards]

Deleted!

[susana]

Hello Don, you have a lovely gallery posted up! Can you give me a tip on how I can download the textures so that I can use them within my Celestia Journeys?! A texture file you download into medres and modify .ssc file, normally, but a gallery picture? Aside from admiring it, what else can I do with it?!
I tried to follow links but they all lead to a gallery, which is amazing stuff, but...
Any hints would be appreciated..
Sorry to ask what maybe the wrong question... there may be copyrights on it or... I would understand if you said so..

[fsgregs]

Dear Susana:

Welcome to the forum and to Celestia. Don may wish to elaborate on my answer here, but in general, as you may have already discovered, there are now over 250 add-ons and perhaps 400 or more textures that have become available for Celestia objects. They are scattered throughout the websites of at least 30 people within the forum. There is not yet a central "repository" for textures and add-ons, but one of our forum members, who is named Mike but goes by the forum name "BillyBob", has assembled an impressive list of add-on links on his website. Don's magnificent Earth and Mars textures are just two of dozens of the better Celestia add-ons that are linked on BillyBob's website.

Its address is: http://mikecelestia.bravehost.com/real.htm

Don's website, which contains his Earth textures, is called Earth Central and can be found here.

http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/Earth_Central_v2/Earth_Centralv2.html

Alternatively, I have been assembling Celestia add-ons for over a year and I feel I have most of the best ones available, already loaded on my system, including Don Edward's great Earth textures. Together, they take up over 2 GB, and fill 3 CD's. If you are interested, I would be willing to copy the files onto 3 CD's and mail them to you at no charge. You simply cover the cost of the CD's and postage. You would simply have to drag them into your Celestia folder, rather than download textures for the next two months. As an added bonus, the files include all of the Educational Activities and accompanying add-ons that I wrote which you previously expressed an interest in.


If you prefer that, send me a private message with your name and mailing address and we'll make some kind of arrangements to get the CD's to you by Christmas.

Regards,

Frank

[hlasko]

Hi everyone,

Any chance someone has a direct way of contacting Don Edwards/email address for them? I quite urgently need to communicate with them.

Hope you can help!
Thanks

[Joey P.]

Any new images of this?

[Joey P.]

Someone did something similar to this (in Celestia) here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18334&p=142243#p142243

[Don. Edwards]

The person wanting to get ahold me did manage to get in touch, so that is all taken care of. Thanks

[SpaceFanatic64]

Bad news, Don Edwards. This website is using your textures without permission! I think it's in Spanish, so use Google translate to know what it's saying. I think the website is still up, but I used archive.org since the website wouldn't load for some reason in Chrome. https://web.archive.org/web/20180227195048/http://celestia.albacete.org/addons/tierra.htm