a hifi set without good loudspeakers is a waste of money! Celestia without professional-level textures is a waste of effort!
After some time, I usually get tired of coding...then --for a while-- a rewarding compensation tends to be my second "native" activity: The GRAPHICS challenge...
I have decided to open and moderate a workshop, dealing with professional level planetary image analysis and Celestia texture production in our Celestial Matters forum. Everything will be based on the amazing USGS software package ISIS 3!
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/index.html
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/UserDocs/index.html
ISIS 3 is simply gigantic and hard to describe in short. But ISIS 3 also has a splendid documentation, a host of tutorials and a most simple installation procedure. It's THE state of the art in this exciting domain of graphical planetary texture research! With ISIS 3 you can do about everything you might have been dreaming about, if you are basically interested in high-quality textures from space missions of all sorts!
Here are a few motivating comments and examples:
- ISIS 3 may serve as an interface between ANY kind of NASA space missions and Celestia textures produced with my F-TexTools/nmtools. The ISIS 3 base format is the "cube", distinguished by the file ending .cub. Here is the definition of a cube file:
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisW ... /cube.html - ISIS 3 offers a host of very versatile programs to import standard images (PDS, JPEG or PNG ) [-> std2isis] or ALL specialized NASA mission formats. And there is a host of programs to export! For example, you may export imaging data to various binary formats of interest as input to my F-TexTools/nmtools. Like signed 16bit integer or 8bit integer. You may assemble mosaics of tiles with one command or click...
- Every command line program of ISIS 3 has a neat GUI option!! So you can use that if you feel alien to command lines. There is a neat viewer program (qview) of whatever you are involved with.
- With ISIS3 you may easily (auto) mosaic mission raw images and reproject them to your gusto:
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisW ... tions.html
Of course the spice library and many other professional interfaces are integrated. You don't have to worry about NASA's standard planetary radii or camera parameters. It's all part of the package! 30GB of standardized planetary mission data are integrated!! - What you need however is harddisk space: something like 30 GB!!! The installation is absolutely straightforward and automatic for Linux.
- There are specialized filter programs to eliminate stripes of all sorts
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisW ... intro.html
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisW ... rcise.html
or seams from mosaics
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisW ... intro.html
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisW ... rcise.html
or many other artefacts... - Like most proper research packages, ISIS 3 is basically developed for a UNIX environment. ISIS 2 works for MAC OS that also has an underlying UNIX OS.
Windows users must run ISIS 3 on some emulator software like VirtualBox for example. - ...
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What is the underlying idea?
I would welcome people interested in this sort of work and notably interested in jointly learning and exchanging know-how in the context of making the best scientific-level textures with the help of ISIS!
This is supposed to be a WORKSHOP with an exciting joint learning experience, rather than an elementary tutorial style for noobs...While it will require some work by the participants, I am convinced it's going to be a satisfying collaboration with lots of useful learning benefits.
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I installed ISIS 3 on my LINUX machine without the slightest problems. It's all downloaded via a rsync server and proceeds completely automatically.
Cheers,
Fridger
