Europa VT Surface Map

[NIGHTCAST2000]

Hi Cartrite,
I like to thank you very much for your help,I read your last post
and I re-arranged the files accordingly.Success! it does work now,here is the screenshot:

[img][img]http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3484/europaviewen6.jpg[/img][/img]

It doesn't look as good as I thought it would do,but oh well,nevermind.

Just one question though,why does the Europa folder need to be repeated in the extras folder for it to work?

Regards,
nightcast2000

[cartrite]

It doesn't. The file I downloaded had the Image Directory folder Europa and the addon folder name I got from your first post that started this thread. BUT .......
inside the extras folder are your addon folders.
(addon folder)
inside the (addon- any name you like- folder(Europa in this case)) you have textures, models or data folders and the ssc file.
textures
inside the textures folder you have lores, medres, hires.
hires
inside any of those folders above you have the (root image diretory Europa in this case) and the ctx file. The ctx file desribes the root image directory.
inside the root diretory you have the folders level0, level1, etc, up to level12.
inside those folders are all the images that Celestia loads.

EDIT

inside any of those folders above you have the (root image diretory Europa in this case) and the ctx file. The ctx file desribes the root image directory.

You can also name this folder anything you want too , BUT the ctx file must agree with the name.

VirtualTexture
{
ImageDirectory "Europa"
BaseSplit 0
TileSize 512
TileType "png"
}

/EDIT

Anyhow, Your Welome, I went through hell trying to figure all this stuff out when I just started using Celestia. That was before my forum days. I still Remember those days too.
cartrite

[NIGHTCAST2000]

Hi Cartrite,
Thanks for clearing that up.I do have an interesting idea,I thought about making Europa more realistic.I've recently downloaded John van Vilet's 8KEuropaNormal.png map to try and give it some surface relief.

The thing I want to know is can I use the VT and 8KEuropaNormal together?(the idea came from reading one of the texture posts on this Forum,I can't remember which one it was though).

I have put the 8kErupoaNormal.png into extras\Europa\textures\hires\Europa.

Regards,
nightcast2000

[cartrite]

Depends on your hardware. I've already done it so if you beat my spec seen at the bottm of all my posts you should be good to go.
Here is the ss file.

Code: Select all

AltSurface "Europa2" "Sol/Jupiter/Europa"
{
Texture "Europa.*"
NormalMap "8kEuropaNormal.png"
SecularTexture "4kEuropaSpec.png"
SpecularPower 5
SpecularColor [ 0.1 0.1 0.11 ]
}

I used the same exact names in the ssc file that were downloaded so that should work. You an try playing around with those last 2 settings if you downloaded the specmap. If not, then you could comment them out by putting a # in front of the line like this

Code: Select all

{
Texture "Europa.*"
NormalMap "8kEuropaNormal.png"
#SecularTexture "4kEuropaSpec.png"
#SpecularPower 5
#SpecularColor [ 0.1 0.1 0.11 ]
}

cartrite

[NIGHTCAST2000]

Hi cartrite,
The main spec of my machine should be in my signeture,I'll give
it a go anyway and see what happens.

Just to be sure,those two .png files should be in the:

extras\Europa\textures\hires\Europa folder?

Regards,
nightcast2000

[cartrite]

Yeah That's the right folder. SORRY No it isn't.
They go in extras/Europa/textures/hires
To expand on that. Images that are in 1 piece go in what I call the "texture subfolders" (in case that's an incorrect usage) which are lores for low resolution, medres for medium resolution, or hires for high resolution. If you have 3 different textures of the same name but different sizes the smallest would generally go in lores but that's not a strict rule.

For example, I have 3 different textures of earth. All are 4k with the same name. I put 1 in each texture sub folder. Then I can change them by typing r or shift R.

Only VT's need an Image diretory. That's what extras/Europa/textures/hires/Europa is. An Image directory defined by a ctx file.

PLEASE disregard my usage of "/" instead of "\". I'm used to typing out linux paths. Windows of course uses "\".

cartrite

[NIGHTCAST2000]

Hi Cartrite,
Hey it's fine,I just made the changes.I've commentd out the specular section becuse I downloaded the 8KSpecular version and I'm not sure what sort of values to put in.

I does work pretty good,but the speed is just bareable(I guess I need more ram)

Regards,
nightcast2000

[cartrite]

In that case all you would have to do is rename it in the ssc file. Instead of SpecularTexture "4kEuropaSpec.png" it would be "8kEuropaSpec.png" or whatever name it is. You could change it as long as the filename is the same in the ssc file.

Anyhow I just seen one of my typos in ("SecularTexture "4kEuropaSpec.png")

I'm a lousy typist and my keyboard misses keys to boot. Time for a new keyboard.

cartrite

[fsgregs]

Nightcast 2000

does work pretty good,but the speed is just bareable(I guess I need more ram)

Be careful when loading high-res textures of Jupiter's moons. If your frame rates are low when viewing Europa due to VT textures and Normalmap, and you position the moon so that a higher-res version of Jupiter and/or another moon is in the same view, then Celestia will have to load 3 high-res texture sets simultaneously. That may freeze up your system for 10 - 20 seconds or so. In some cases, the freeze is solid and you have to reboot the computer.

Of course, it depends upon your system ... but Celestia's memory management is becoming unmanageable when throwing lots of high-res texture sets at it.

FYI

Frank

[Malenfant]

you really shouldn't be loading a normalmap at all for Europa - we don't have a lot of topography data for it, and what we have is of very small areas and not too reliable.

So if you want to speed things up a bit you can ditch the normalmap and not lose any real data.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure why you'd want to load a specular map either - I don't recall seeing any evidence that Europa has specular highlights anywhere (on a global scale anyway).

[cartrite]

you really shouldn't be loading a normalmap at all for Europa - we don't have a lot of topography data for it, and what we have is of very small areas and not too reliable.

So if you want to speed things up a bit you can ditch the normalmap and not lose any real data.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure why you'd want to load a specular map either - I don't recall seeing any evidence that Europa has specular highlights anywhere (on a global scale anyway).

Your probally right here. I was just going thru the motions to see what I needed to do to help NIGHTCAST2000. I was kind of surprised to see a spec map but I never really did any research on europa so I thought. Oh well.

NIGHTCAST2000,
I would look into getting more ram. 1 more GB can make a world of difference.

cartrite

[NIGHTCAST2000]

Hi guys,
I just thought it would be possible to do something like that.
I will disable the NormalMap and the SpecularMap.In a way,I used Eupropa as a `Guinea Pig` since I have seen particularly some Earth and Mars textures use them sort of maps along with their tuxtures.

I am thinking for my next project is one of the VT textures for Earth's Moon.I will be having a look at Motherlode in a bit to see what's there.

I would like to get some more RAM for my system,but since I'm unemployed at the moment,I'll have to put that on hold for a while.
My motherboard will only take PC2100 speed DDR to fill all three slots with sticks of !Gb and PC2700 for two sticks of the same capacity.

Anyway,I would like to thank everybody who helped me(especially cartrite) on completeting my project.

Regards,nighcast2000