Earth Night

[John Van Vliet]

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[LordFerret]

What resolutions will you be offering this in? 1k? 2k?

[John Van Vliet]

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[Dollan]

As long as the subject is raised, and since searching the forum produced literally hundreds of results...

Is there a tutorial anywhere that can aid in creating fairly realistic night textures? I need to make one for a world which is highly industrialized, but I don't want to blunder through and just make a bunch of random splotches.

...John...

[LordFerret]

a 2048 x 1024.png , 4096 x 2048.png and level 0 ,1 ,2 ,3 ,4 ,5

all the way up to 32768 x16384.png
the preview is of the 32k image

Oh I hope my system can handle it (the 2048x1024)... it's beautiful, looks photo-realistic.

[John Van Vliet]

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[selden]

John,

One method I've seen described is to use a real streetmap or roadmap and colorize it.

[Dyne]

As long as the subject is raised, and since searching the forum produced literally hundreds of results...

Is there a tutorial anywhere that can aid in creating fairly realistic night textures? I need to make one for a world which is highly industrialized, but I don't want to blunder through and just make a bunch of random splotches.

There's this one (big image) from Solar Voyager's tutorials page (which is linked from the stickied tutorials list in this forum). It seems to be more or less what selden is referring to.

[Dollan]

Thanks much, guys!

...John...

[John Van Vliet]

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[fsgregs]

John:

Is the deep blue tint spread across the entire night texture real, or an artifact of the camera/image? What would we really see if viewing Earth from space at the distance shown in your screenshots?



Frank

[John Van Vliet]

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[fsgregs]

John:

I for one would like the most realistic image of what would be seen from space, so a nightlights without the blue would be great, if you could upload it.

Thanks

Frank

[Ozark]

Hi fsgregs,

It's not Johns Map but its about as real as you can get!

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/global_composites_v2.html

For a realistic view from Earth as far as "color" goes, google sattelite images, and then color the maps accordingly.

Ozark

[fsgregs]

Ozark:

WOW, I've never run across a 3 Gigabyte single image file before. It's a bit too large for use in Celestia . Does anyone have a more user friendly night texture that is recent? The ones on the motherlode are good, but I'm just seeing what else is available.

Frank

[danielj]

I can??t find your new nightmap in Motherlode.Only the OLD 16k night map already there for a long time.Anyway,again the textures are lacking a .ctx file to make the map works in Celestia...

[ANDREA]

I can??t find your new nightmap in Motherlode.Only the OLD 16k night map already there for a long time.

Danielj, it's been told many many times that Motherlode is a one-man voluntary job, and that it may take even one month to get files available in the web (and, if you don't remember it, in Northern hemisphere it's holiday time!).
So please don't hurry who is doing this free of charge!

Anyway,again the textures are lacking a .ctx file to make the map works in Celestia...

Once again I don't understand your absolute unwill to learn something and to try yourself a solution.
Anyhow, if you take one of the ctx files that you can find with VT files, you'll see something like this:

VirtualTexture
{
ImageDirectory "Goofy"
BaseSplit 0
TileSize 512
TileType "dds"
}

So, after downloading the VT files of your interest, change the ImageDirectory if it's not "Goofy", then check the tile size and modify the given value, if needed, so as the tile type, if it's not .dds.
That's all!
Too much difficult? Don't make me laugh, please!

Andrea

[John Van Vliet]

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[Ozark]

fsgregs,

Post Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 9:23 am Post subject:
Ozark:

WOW, I've never run across a 3 Gigabyte single image file before. It's a bit too large for use in Celestia Wink . Does anyone have a more user friendly night texture that is recent? The ones on the motherlode are good, but I'm just seeing what else is available.

Frank

Yes it is a very large file, However, with virtual textures, 3GB is a piece of cake. Note that the 64k SRTM Normal map of Earth is a 1.2GB download and unzips to a whopping 7.3GB file and Celestia easily handles this size if you use virtual textures. In any case, The night light map comes in three files zipped into one. I only used one of the files provided which is approximately 642MB as this was acceptable for my own use of a night Map. Sorry, I didn't find a more current map.