Celestia Forums

Is there any world map textures to use with celestia (virtual textures will be wonderful), so that we can turn celestia into a 3d globe

You are kidding!?

Chris,

Why should he be kidding?

I suspect Bluespace is referring to things like political, topographic and road maps, not photographic images of the terrain. The latter are readily available on the Motherlode and elsewhere.

I don't know of any published Addons that use traditional maps as surface textures for the whole planet, although there are a few of limited regions. One of the problems is that most of those maps are copyright by their creators and cannot be modified and published by others without permission.

However, Grant Hutchison has provided an Addon which outlines countries. It's available at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... rders.html

For some of his other contributions, see http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... index.html

selden wrote:Chris,

Why should he be kidding?

I suspect Bluespace is referring to things like political, topographic and road maps, not photographic images of the terrain. The latter are readily available on the Motherlode and elsewhere.
...

Selden,

if so, then I REALLY ask myself why he did not EXACTLY WRITE this?

Why are people always so sloppy in expressing what they REALLY want? Guessing takes time, in general, while bad formulations save time AHA!

I also thought the request was a joke ...

OK, some of us are not native English speakers, but even more so: in an international forum, EVERYONE should try hard to express him/herself clearly...

Bye Fridger

selden wrote:Chris,

Why should he be kidding?

I suspect Bluespace is referring to things like political, topographic and road maps, not photographic images of the terrain...

Ok, indeed I took world map as earth map... Effectively, I suppose a world map is synonymous of a political map...

BTW, a cmod borders line model would be nice... No one as an idea how to generate such model?

ElChristou wrote:BTW, a cmod borders line model would be nice... No one as an idea how to generate such model?

I already have one, generated with Mathematica. There's a world function in this software which allowed me to make a model. The CMOD file is pretty big, however.

I just need to figure out how to apply the "four colors theorem" on the model, so no countries with the same color are having a common border.

Cham wrote:

ElChristou wrote:BTW, a cmod borders line model would be nice... No one as an idea how to generate such model?

I already have one, generated with Mathematica. There's a world function in this software which allowed me to make a model. The CMOD file is pretty big, however.

I just need to figure out how to apply the "four colors theorem" on the model, so no countries with the same color are having a common border.

Can that model to be hollowed with a sphere of less diameter in order to reduce the polygons?

Fenerit wrote:Can that model to be hollowed with a sphere of less diameter in order to reduce the polygons?

Fenerit,

it's a CMOD line model. Not a polygons based one.

Cham wrote:

ElChristou wrote:BTW, a cmod borders line model would be nice... No one as an idea how to generate such model?

I already have one, generated with Mathematica. There's a world function in this software which allowed me to make a model. The CMOD file is pretty big, however.

Because too much point? no way to do a low, medres and highres model? but BTW, what data do you use to generate the lines? (or you mean Mathematica have a kind of embedded feature?)

ElChristou wrote:but BTW, what data do you use to generate the lines? (or you mean Mathematica have a kind of embedded feature?)

I always wondered why such a math software as Mathematica has the world frontiers data included in it. You can make a simple search on the web (with "Mathematica" and "world map" as key words), to see lots of nice graphics generated with this software.

See for example this page :

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematic ... tting.html

sorry that i made t00fri's brain to think so heavy maybe the working with theoretical physics was the problem because of the vast amount of explanations needed in the field, i don't know if in your country if you go to a store and said i need a world map or globe they are going to give u a huge satellite photo collections of the world

Meantime

Thank you very much Selden, for the link, and it also uses the VT's, even though a real world map would haven been great, but this combined with the country names and capitals would do the trick

just now i tried to put a map in place of the earth texture, but is disturbing, maybe i could get a good map, things will go right, but i am not sure if the placement will go correct

Bluespace,

I'm not sure why you think there's something wrong with your map. The white spot is "specular reflection". You can control that by either providing a specular reflection texture or by changing its color or size. The entry in solarsys.ssc expects you to provide it as part of the surface texture image, but you can change that.

Celestia also wants the map to be a simple cylindrical projection with 0 degrees of longitude in the center. Most political maps use Mercator projection.

There are several documents available describing SSC files and surface textures. The Motherlode's documentation page is one place to start. http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/d ... ation.html

Thanks again, i tried correcting the specular reflection (but for sure i need more reading ),

So at the end of the day this is what I've got

1) With the "Borders" installation from the link Selden gave




2) Another downloaded map (but so much copyright messages)




Now what left is, the need of a good, clear map and as mentioned by Selden "a cylindrical projected" , hmmm.... maybe some more search will give success

Cham wrote:

Fenerit wrote:Can that model to be hollowed with a sphere of less diameter in order to reduce the polygons?

Fenerit,

it's a CMOD line model. Not a polygons based one.

I've understood. Ok Cham, a little out of topic, but do you know some free software with which doing approximatively the same things as Mathematica? Intend in specific, points distributions and wireframes object to be exported as 3d primitives (not shaded). The "conventional" 3d modellers lack in these matters (they use the transparent shaders, instead). I've found the excellent multiplatform K3dSurf http://k3dsurf.sourceforge.net/ which export in .OBJ format but it doesn't seem able to make this operation.

Fenerit wrote:do you know some free software with which doing approximatively the same things as Mathematica? Intend in specific, points distributions and wireframes object to be exported as 3d primitives (not shaded).

Sorry, no, I don't know of any freeware or shareware which can do the same. It doesn't mean there isn't any, though.

There's a problem with this approach (a CMOD model for the borders, that is) : there isn't any "custom classes" or "layers" in Celestia. Once it's installed in the extras, the borders are always there and you can't turned them OFF. Using the borders as a "nebula" (or "spacecraft") isn't very satisfying. That's why I removed the model from my installation. Moving it back and restarting Celestia just to show the borders isn't great either. I made this model several months ago, as a test, while I was doing some magnetic field lines models. I ended with the conclusion that it isn't satisfying for countries borders until we get some "custom classes" (in yet several decades to come !).

Actually, there is a hack whereby you can do the equivalent of turning models off and on. If you write a Lua ScriptedOrbit routine, it can move a model to a distance of 1e32 (for example) when you type an appropriate Select command. Celestia doesn't draw models which are that far away.

Cham wrote:There's a problem with this approach (a CMOD model for the borders, that is) : there isn't any "custom classes" or "layers" in Celestia. Once it's installed in the extras, the borders are always there and you can't turned them OFF.

Martin,

Here, we could use the object:setradius() method that I've recently comitted to the CVS version of Celestia. If the model is declared in a .ssc file, it is possible to use a Celx script or the Lua Tools to set the radius of the model to a very small value (e.g., 1e-12), in order to make it quite invisible. Setting back the radius of the model to its original value will make it visible again.

This way, the model could be enabled/disabled using a key or the UI of the Lua Tools (via a check box).