New 16k Earth Texture - Warning Large graphics inside!!

[granthutchison]

That's really one of the worst environmental shames - the fate of the Aral Sea.

Yes indeed. See here for an up-to-date image and discussion, if anyone's interested.

Grant

[don]

Geeeez, I had no idea.

Makes me wonder what the long-term consequences will be when China dams the Yangtze river, if they ever finish the project, aside from all the initial flooding <frown>.

[billybob884]

don, a little off topic, but where did you get those clouds?

[Don. Edwards]

The clouds are my creation.
They started off as Fridger's bumpmaped clouds, but only at 2k. I then found out that Celestia had a 4k cloudmap limit so I chose to go to the max.
I resized Frider's cloudmap to 4k, blurred it a little and saved it. Then I went to Blue-Marble and and downloaded there 8k cloudmap. I resized it to 4k. I used GIMP to create a transparent cloudmap and saved it as a .png.
I then used GIMP to give a copy of the new coludmap some bumpmaped detail, first from one direction and then from the other. Then I moved to Photoshop. I loaded Fridger's cloudmap at 4k, and the both of the new cloudmaps bumped and unbumped. First I pasted the new bumpmaped cloudmap on top of Frider's cloudmap and merged them together. This added more detail to Fridger's clouds. Now this is when my memory starts to fail me. I tried many combinations but I think this is what I did. I pasted a copy of the new flat cloudmap on top of the new merged clouds. Then I used the brightness control to shift it to a grey color and made it 50% more transparent. This made all the clouds have a gray look but the bumpmaping showed through. Then I pasted another copy of the flat 4k clouds on top of that and made it about 70% transparent. This brought the clouds back to white with a little of the gray showing here and there that gave it a sense of depth. I then merged the layers and saved it. I also saved it as a .tga for .dds creation.
Now I have never been able to recreate the making of these clouds. They really were an accident in many attempts to create a good 4k cloudmap. To this day I kick myself for not taking notes on what I really was doing. And no this isn't just some way for me to keep how I did this a secret. I really and truly can't remake these clouds. All I can do is edit the master .png for various needs. Like adding the Hurricanes. I am seriously considering trying to remake these clouds but I haven't really given it a try again. As you can see it is very involved. I have released the Northern Winter clouds with my 8k Earth texture on my Earth Central site.
The clouds you see are in a bit of the raw condition. I need to work then over a little. This is the set with the Hurricane in it.

Don.

[billybob884]

I really like it, would you mind sending it to me?

[Don. Edwards]

The 16k Realistic Earth texture is ready for download!
Head over to the all new Earth Central to download it.


http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/Earth_Cent ... ralv2.html

[Darkmiss]

Great, getting it now.

You just need flashing lights for that header Don.

Hey I really like the Clouds on your 18,000 BCE Earth Preview picture
any chance you could make that available ?

Lastly i would like to thank you Don, for your time and effort on this project.

[Don. Edwards]

Those are just Fridger's bumpmaped clouds. Not my own creation. I did tweak the color of the picture some in Photoshop and increased the contrast some. That kind of made them stans out more.

Don.

[bh]

Sorry Don... I think my last question got lost in the thread.

Is there any major differences with the official release and the 'test' version? I'm using a dailup connection.

I'm really getting a buzz out of this 16k, and it works great on my GF2!

The shallow water looks fantastic...reefs,atolls and the like. Quite breathtaking!

I like to view from the shuttle with a small FOV...maybe about 20. It's still nice and smooth...great job.

Many regards...bh.

[Don. Edwards]

bh,
There is probably a 5% diference between the beta and the release texture. You could just hang on to the beta texture and waite for the v.2 texture because it will have the most changes. Thats what I would do.

As for the links I was getting tired and punchy last ninght. I will fix the link problem tonight.

Don.

[bh]

Thanks Don...here we are, just crossing the African coast..Tunisia I think...bloody great!!


Many thanks...bh.

[Darkmiss]

Don, I thought your last set of eath textures was the best around.
and now you have Blown them away.

The colouring on these new textures looks great.
More colourful but not as saturated as the blue marbel maps.

I have the 8k and 16k textures

great job on the ocean clean up since the test texture

and i spose i was wrong about the grey blob in the centre of Africa
It just that i couln't see this in any other texture.

By the way.... what is it ?

[Don. Edwards]

Darkmiss,
In my old texture that lake I guess was dry. But in the Blue-Marble textures it is blue. I really don't have any other reference to go from but the Blue-Marble stuff. So there it is.

Don.

[fsgregs]

Don, what can I say

In all the mix of textures, I am losing track of what normal map or bump map I should use for your new 16K Earth texture. Could you be kind enough please to post your normal or bump map on your website for download?

Thanks

Frank

[HankR]

Don,

Do you have a version of your 16K earth texture in .jpg. or .png or .tif format? If so, could you make one available for download (at least on a temporary basis)?

I'm experimenting with Chris' virtual textures (large textures split into small tiles that are loaded as needed) and my texture splitting tool can't handle .dds files.

Thanks.

- Hank

P.S. Anyone have a 32K earth texture in one of the above formats?

[Don. Edwards]

HankR,
The 16k texture is 384Mb in .tga form. A little big to uplaod to the server and a little big to download. I simply do not have enough system RAM to save it in a .jpg of any useable quality. Even with all optimisations turned off Photoshop and GIMP simply won't do it. So as It stands the textrue is in 3 formats. A 384mb bitmap, a 384mb targa, and an 84mb .dds.
This just goes to show why we use the .dds format in the first palce.
Another reason is the storage space for my textures is on the shatters.net server and uploading and downloading this beast is sure to slow the server down some. I don't think Chris and the other memebers would be to happy about that. Now I might consider breaking it up into 4k x 4k tiles. But even that would end up being quite an upload as well.
I also have the two halves of the 32k texture but it doesn't have my color modifications as of yet and I can't put it together as a single texture as of yet. But this is were the virtual texture tiles is going to save the day. So with that in mind I will be trying to work on a 32k texture tiles package based on the 16k texture coloring. Its just going to take a little while.

Don.

[DBrady(not logged in)]

Hank,
you can use my devIL tool to change the 16k earth.dds to any format you like- provided you have 512 ram and a large amount virtual memory.
There will be some loss of quality though but if your only experimenting...

[Darkmiss]

I noticed this....
I used your Devil tool, and noticed the quality of my dds textures was dropping a bit,

So i did a direct comparison with a texure useing the devil tool, and the NVtool.

The NVtool took twice as long to produce the dds file, but didn't have any loss in detail.

[HankR]

Don,

I strongly encourage you to experiment with your earth texture in Chris' new virtual texture format. You can use .dds format for the tiles. If you can make your texture available as a virtual texture that would be great.

DBrady,

I do have 512K of RAM, and plenty of VM. Where can I get the MacOS X version of your devIL tool?.

- Hank

[Mikeydude750]

Nice texture. Makes my Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb worth the 400 I paid for it.

Now...if I can find a normal map that will work with it(I have no luck with any texture maps I have used so far...oh, and before you ask, texture maps do work with my card, because Mars has one on it without any problems).