Earth Flooded! Part II: The Floodening

[Sum0]

I've finished a 8K flooded Earth (roughly 100 metres sea level rise) with a 8k bump map, but they're slow JPEGs (also in PNG and PSD), so if someone could advise me on how to convert them to DDS I'd be grateful.

Here's a few screenshots to whet your appetite...
The Amazon floods!

Looks like the end of Redfish

[ElPelado]

you can use the Adobe Photo Shop with the dds plug-in. I used it to convert textures to that format.


The textures look pretty well

[marc]

Looks great Sum0, what does Australia look like?

[ElPelado]

I don't know if your are planing to do it, but with more water one the Earth, I think that there will be also more clouds, am I right?

[Darkmiss]

Hello SumO
Here is the file I use to convert textures to dds
its a small Dos based Nvidia program

http://www.bt.homepage.btinternet.co.uk/Files/DDS-Texture-Converter.zip

just extact the files, Convert your texture to TGA format.
Put the TGA texture in the same folder as the converter.
And the run the BAT file to convert. Easy

Conversion can take from 30 seconds to a few minutes.
Depending on the compression rate and / or Image size.

Also edit the BAT file to change the texture compresion to Dxt1, Dxt1a, Dxt3, or Dxt5.
Dxt1 = Highest Compression Dxt5 = Lowest Compression
In between im not sure, as it has to do with Alpha channels, witch im not up to speed on just yet.

[MrBatman]

I heard a guy on the radio saying that the current "global warming" was actually just a prelude to a new Ice Age, that there was a global warming event immediately prior to the last few Ice Ages. When you're done with this, can you do an "Iced Earth", with sea levels about 300 feet below today's levels and ice sheets down to about 40-45 degrees?

[Borg Collective]

Quite real, SumO, quite real...

QUEEN: "Nice..."

[ElPelado]

what was that picture????????

[Borg Collective]

SumO "dancer".

[Sum0]

Hmm, very nice

Darkmiss, I've tried your program and it seems to finish converting the file (it begins with "\earthflood8k.tga -->", then a minute or so later it becomes "\earthflood8k.tga --> .\earthflood8k.dds", but all I get is a 0kb "scratch.tmp" file and nothing else. Am I doing something wrong? Is the DDS outputted somewhere else?

MrBatman, about the Iced Earth... who knows? It'd certainly be fun...

[praesepe]

Sum0,

Another way to convert it to dxt is by using the nvdxt utilities from Nvidia's website. All you have to do is to save your texture in .tga format, open a new DOS windows (i.e, cmd or command depending on which OS you use) and type the following:

nvdxt -file earthflood.tga -24 dxt1c (in case you don't have an alpha channel, i.e. spec map)

or

nvdxt -file earthflood.tga -24 dxt3 (creates a dds with an alpha channel)

In both cases the process can take some minutes depending on your processor's speed and the ram availabe. In my particupar case, it takes about 10 minutes with a P4 2.4 GHz and 512 Mb DDR RAM.

[ElPelado]

I used the tga-->dds converter and it worked. I told you: you can also use the Photo shop plug-in.

[Don. Edwards]

I have never got the Photoshop plug-in to work with anything bigger than 4k. If the texture is 8k he has to use the NVidia converter. The file Darkmiss posted is the NVidia converter with a batch/script so you don't have to keep editing and manually typing in all the *.tga location and info. Its a shortcut.
Sum0,
How much memory do you have? You need to have at least 768mb of RAM under XP to do the converting. This is the main problem with the NVdxt converter. It needs gobs of memory. The author is supposed to be working on this. At least I believe he still is.
If you have at least 768mb of RAM try closing all programs that are running in the background to try an free up as much memory as possible. I have 1.5gb of Ram and I thought it would help me make 16k textures. I was wrong. But it helps speed up the creation of 8k textures. now they only take about 3.5 to 4 minutes to crunch.

Don.

[t00fri]

I have never got the Photoshop plug-in to work with anything bigger than 4k. If the texture is 8k he has to use the NVidia converter. The file Darkmiss posted is the NVidia converter with a batch/script so you don't have to keep editing and manually typing in all the *.tga location and info. Its a shortcut.
Sum0,
How much memory do you have? You need to have at least 768mb of RAM under XP to do the converting. This is the main problem with the NVdxt converter. It needs gobs of memory. The author is supposed to be working on this. At least I believe he still is.
If you have at least 768mb of RAM try closing all programs that are running in the background to try an free up as much memory as possible. I have 1.5gb of Ram and I thought it would help me make 16k textures. I was wrong. But it helps speed up the creation of 8k textures. now they only take about 3.5 to 4 minutes to crunch.

Don.

Strange, even on my Laptop under XP with only 256MB of RAM I can easily convert 8k textures with the Photoshop plugin. It is most important, though to assign /lots of/ virtual memory on another partition than the boot partition. You MUST use one of Doug's latest plugins, since he has put in great effort to improve the memory management.

However, 16k images are hard. 16k normal maps I get converted though under 512MB RAM with Dougs recent normalmap plugin for Photoshop

But recently, this is not necessary anymore, since there is a much faster GIMP plugin and most recently, Chris' 16bit raw -> 8bit normalmap converter that works fast and gives amazing quality normal maps.

Bye Fridger

[ElPelado]

so, where can i find a good normal map for the earth??? i did one but it doesn't look goos.

[Don. Edwards]

Well that sounds good. I will have to try the newer plug-in then. Even with all the memeory I have working with a 16k texture is time comsuming. I have yet to try Darkmiss' little hack to make a 16k texture.

Don.