"Yet Another New Earth Cloud Map Texture, This Time 4K"

[Jango Fett]

Thanks jim!


I increased paging file up to 2048 MB per partition, and it works. I didn't know these textures demand so much memory.

Thank you also for DXT Compression Tools, but I need it for editing, not for conversion, so Photoshop is fine enough for my needs...

[Jango Fett]

This is what I was talking about.

It's a little too bumpy (BumpHeight 5, maybe 3 or 4 would do fine) and generaly needs much more improvement. On some places looks very bad - the bumpmap texture needs to be adapted, and it would look great on 16 k version...

[Don. Edwards]

OK Rass I will give it a try. I was at the doctors most of the day yesterday getting diagnosed. Ends up I at the end of the nasty flu bug flying around here in Oregon, I contracted the worst sinus infection I have ever had. My vision was being imapiared and the pain in my forhead made sitting at the computer imposible at times. I am on some serious meds to fight it and am feeling a heck of alot better. Although I have to go to work to night, Grave shift. I hate working 2 part time jobs. Well enough of me whining about my troubles and back to work on textures ASAP. I was thinking of taking my notebook computer to work and use it to work on the textures but its only got an ATI mobile chipset and is pretty limited to what I can see in Celestia. So everyone give me a few days and I will start to post new screen grabs and posibly a new cloud texture for everyone to try.
Don

[Don. Edwards]

Jango Fett,
If you are using Photoshop, try using the majic wand and select the clouds. All the clouds should get selected and everything elsc that is white, and try aplying a lite blur effect. This might help smooth out the clouds. My only problem with your sceme is that everythin that is white is going to show as a higher elevation. Which makes me think that the polar caps are going to floating up in the clouds as well. If a 2048x1024 cloud texture doesn't have the detail you want you could do what nameless is doing and try a 2048x2048 cloud texture. It will be square but Celestia will do the stetching of the texture and it might give you the added detail you want. If you would like, I will do a resize of the 4k texture to 2kx2k and you can give that a try. I will go ahead and do the conversion and place it in my storage area. If you answer back before I leave for work I will post the url.
Don

[Rassilon]

Use these settings in lighting effects...



and a brightness/contrast of

brightness + 30
contrast -30

Then do your shadowing underneath the clouds by copying the texture and pasting a duplicate layer...Give it a darker hue and a bit of blur then use offset at x=3 y=3 and you should have some decent looking clouds...

Play around some your bound to come up with something good...Ill delve a bit into this when I got time...remember this is alot of the techniques I use for my alien worlds so some might not come out picture perfect right off the bat...

[Jango Fett]

Ok here's another shot...
This is with bumpheight 3, I think it looks better...


Don
Well, youre right about polar caps, they look awfull, but I was planing to do more sacrifice - to put cloud bumpmap only (this is currently combination of clouds bumpmap over earth bumpmap in one jpeg), that means no earth bumpmap.

I did the things in photoshop you mentioned, the cloud layer is combined with earth from png file with transparency, so I didn't have to use magic wand. It was 4k cloudmap whic I increased to 8k and I did add some blur (7,5 Gaussian). It looks pretty good. There are no pixel marks.

Major problem with this is it requires 8k bumpmap which swallows memory or it will look very bad (at 4k it look like a disaster, 8k is maybe acceptable for non-enthuziasts, but 16k would look great, although I don't know how many years will past until we could buy that kind of graphic cards... ), so you have to have at least 128 MB graphic memory to achieve acceptable framerate. To show this screenshot, I had to turn off cloud texture and night texture, and it still goes at 0,5 fps...

[Jango Fett]

P.S. Don could you look at my last screenshot, at the bootom of image below sunlight? Can you see squares and lines? They do not exist on dds texture when I open it in Photoshop, and they are even more visible at 4k texture.

[Don. Edwards]

Hey Ras thanks for the info. Is this in Photoshop? just to make sure we are on the same page here so to speak. I also notice your using a skining program for titlebars? I do the same but I have taken mine to extreme.

Jango Fett,
I have already posted the file you can get it here: http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/2k-X-2kclouds.zip
Give this a try and see if you like the results. I haven't tried cloudmaps at this res so I don't know if there is going to be any disortion. One thing though. I was able to do some pretty amazing things with a GeForce2 MX 200 with only 32mb of VRAM. As for those slow frames. Make sure your systems AGP bus is optimised for best speed. Meaning that if your system supports 4xAGP mode make sure you have it set for that speed and that the proper chipset drivers are loaded to alow the setting. I did notice that when my older system if the AGP mode was defaulted to 2x there was a slowdown in the video cards loading of textures and a slight slowdown to frame rates. I guess the main thing is make sure every single part of your system is tuned and running at its best posible level. Just some pointers. Hope it helps.

[chris]

So I guess what I'm hearing here is that you want to make bump mapped cloud maps?

There are a couple of options . . . If the clouds are a constant color (say, white for Earth), the normals can go in the RGB portion of the texture, and the opacity in alpha channel. Or you could have a second map, but that does require more memory . . .

It occurs to me that cloud maps are taking way more memory than they have to . . . With a monochromatic cloud map, you can easily get away with using an 8-bit per pixel alpha map. Or better yet, treat the color in a DXT1 as a transparency value, for 8:1 compression. Hmmm . . .

--Chris

[Rassilon]

a momo cloud map can also be colorized using scripts...Also it may be possible to use a jpg for clouds just as long as in that channel black is construed as transparent...but theres a problem with that...what if one wants black clouds? Then I suppose they use the script right...cloud maps would then always appear as alpha channels and 8 bit and so much smaller...

The dxt approach is another option but I still havent gotten a good looking cloud map at 2k and under using dxt compression...always appears too blocky...more so than using a png or jpg...

Really chris if at all possible bump maps and shadows for clouds would be sweet

Many choices never enough time

[Don. Edwards]

Jango Fett
I see the distortions in the picture. However I have never seen anything like that in Celestia being rendered. Something is definetly amiss here. Maybe chris will chime in with the reason why you might be getting that or anyone else that might know.

[Jango Fett]

Don, about the distorsions...

I think it has to do something with mip maps or generaly with dds conversion, since I have converted jpg to dds, and I didn't change anything in nVidia's save dialog settings (it was default settings, DXT3 Explicit Alpha and "Generate Mip Maps" was on). I'm dummy for alll that, so if you have any suggestions...


I'm beginnig to think you haven't understand the principle of my work, which I explained in my post before first posted image, so I'll explain it again just for to be sure...
There is NO cloud layer. There is no cloud texture. The clouds are part of earth texture, so they are unmovable, and because of that I can put any image size I want. The clouds I'm using are 8192x4096 in size (cause it's an 8k texture of earth), so it's not iritating when you approach to the Earth'y near orbit and see those pixel squares. The 2kx2k texture is no much use for this cause I already use 8k. Therefore I can also use real bumpmapping, for which I have created combined bumpmap where clouds have greatest elevation (the "strongest white" details in bumpmap jpeg). Of course, there's much more to improve, because on some places clouds above oceans look like they are part of the oceans, for example.
It also looks pretty solid, as it's part of a surface, not soft and semi-transparent clouds...

By looking at NASA's space images, I realized that bumpyness of Earth's surface is much more result of clouds than the real surface. It would be much more realistic if we had real bummmapping for cloud and not for surface than reverse, so Chris, are you planning to do something like that in next versions?

[Don. Edwards]

No I understood you when you said there was no cloud layer. I personaly don't see a good reason not to use the cloudmaps fuction. Earth will never be rendered or emulated properly with your plan. I was just offering another alternative.
As for the .dds conversions. I believe the number one rule is to always, always convert from .TGA or better known as targa format to .dds. Being that .jpg is a lossy format this is probably a major part of the problem. Try saveing your work in Photoshop as a .tga instead and then convert the .tga to .dds. I have never really had a problem this way.Give it try.
Don

[Jango Fett]

Ok thanks for advice, I used 2k x 2k cloud tex and it's better than 2048x1024...

Anyway, the main problem here is bumpmapping cloud layer and using .dds as a bumpmap texture. I hope Chris will make it possible in next versions...

[Don. Edwards]

Even if Chris implemented cloudmap bumpmaping its just another thing to take resources away from your video card. I feel that the bumpmaping technics that can be achived in Photshop and GIMP can more than hold there own and they certainly take up alot less resorces that way. And for someone with a GeForce2 card that would be the next best thing. Adding another texture layer even if its for cloud bumpmaping would pobably bring your video card to a crawl. At this point you have only two options, go with the idea you are working on, or use one the prebumpmaped cloud textures Fridger made or my modified versions of it.
As for the 2kx2k texture. I think by using it you are getting a virtual 4kx2k cloudmap. Of course it may just resize it verticaly instead of horizontaly. If it does resize verticaly you might as well go back to a 2kx1k cloudmap. Again you may be burning unessary vram in the process. We are going to have to from either Fridger or Chris on how Celestia does resizing of square textures.

[Jango Fett]

Don, I'm dissapointed. I see you have no vision of near future. You can be sure that in one or two years we will have graphic cards with average memory of 512 MB to 1 GB (AGP 8-16-32x, DDR2 & DDR3 memory technologies) , capable of many new features. We will also have about 512MB-2GB of RAM and 200 GB HDDs, along with processors above 4 GHz. And of course, managing 16k textures for every layer will be possible. This is a good reason to begin building these features in Celestia right now.

In my opinion, bumpmapping cloud layers is much more important than bumopmapping earth surface, and if it can be done by programming, our cards could manage that right now.

I', not satisfied with "simulation" of bumpmaps by editing in Photoshop or GIMP, I want the real stuff...

I'm sure it's possible to achieve all this progress for Chris...

[nameless]

Don,
I'm flattered you seem to think i'm a pioneer of some kind of 'Square' cloudmap technique but i've never heard of such a thing! Just for the record i have a geforce4 64mb ti4200 and use 4096x2048 cloudmaps.

Ps. You must be on some pretty savage medication to come up with that!

[t00fri]

Ok here's another shot...
This is with bumpheight 3, I think it looks better...
http://www.teme.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=95327

Don
Well, youre right about polar caps, they look awfull, but I was planing to do more sacrifice - to put cloud bumpmap only (this is currently combination of clouds bumpmap over earth bumpmap in one jpeg), that means no earth bumpmap.

I did the things in photoshop you mentioned, the cloud layer is combined with earth from png file with transparency, so I didn't have to use magic wand. It was 4k cloudmap whic I increased to 8k and I did add some blur (7,5 Gaussian). It looks pretty good. There are no pixel marks.

Major problem with this is it requires 8k bumpmap which swallows memory or it will look very bad (at 4k it look like a disaster, 8k is maybe acceptable for non-enthuziasts, but 16k would look great, although I don't know how many years will past until we could buy that kind of graphic cards... :lol: ), so you have to have at least 128 MB graphic memory to achieve acceptable framerate. To show this screenshot, I had to turn off cloud texture and night texture, and it still goes at 0,5 fps...

With all respect and unbiased naivity, but this looks like "plastified whipped cream". I am sure you understand what I mean...

Somebody once told me that it is not all that easy to bumpmap clouds;-)

Bye Fridger

[Nameless]

I have my 4kclouds dds in my yahoo briefcase. I think they're downloadable from the following links:

http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/users/b78385c2 ... .AR_RUD7Rr
http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/users/b78385c2 ... .AnAFLbiZL
http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/users/b78385c2 ... .AyXBz5bP_

Download all the files, put them in a folder on their own and execute the bat file. This will make zip file, then just unzip. Complicated i know but yahoo won't aloud an upload of more then 5mb at a time.
Feedback welcome.(good or bad-fridger) bye the way last post was gas!

[t00fri]

Feedback welcome.(good or bad-fridger) bye the way last post was gas! :D

Why don't you try instead to get your URL's right...

Bye Fridger