Celestia Forums

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I'm not aware of any photoshop plugins, but you can use my full-featured DDS converter:

Squish DDS download page (Most recent version is 1.1)

Batch conversion of entire trees of folders is possible, which makes virtual textures easy to convert.

Okay dirkpitt... I'll give it a try... just want to convert a hires earth tiff to dds. (just for practise)!

It worked well! It crashed out on completion and it took a few goes to get a result. I guess it's a memory/graphics card issue. I have an Intel mini.

FYI I downloaded from the blue marble the land_shallow_topo_21600.tiff and resized to 16384x8192 png (the mac didn't like that at all!).

Then opened with Squish DDS and exported as DXT1 with mips.

Super... I've got an Earth tex with a super frame rate that compares well with Haralds VT set (although a bit too saturated... will play some more with it).

I've got to add the northern ice and clone out a few holes but I'm pleased with it so far... many thanks dirk.

Thanks for the crash report - is this TIFF freely downloadable?
If so, I'll try and reproduce this problem on my own.

Yes... can I find it again! Jeez those NASA guys sure know how to confuse the viewer...

No worries, I think I found it here. (Visible Earth site, 173.5MB)

That's the one!

Update: I have an idea as to where the problem is, but haven't managed to do much rigorous testing yet.
It's most likely failing due to the size - large images may need to be tiled by the program.

bh wrote:FYI I downloaded from the blue marble the land_shallow_topo_21600.tiff and resized to 16384x8192 png (the mac didn't like that at all!)

Why don??t you try the F-TexTools? Works on OSX and is probably much more economical for such a large texture as it does not load the huge graphics on your screen at all, just whizzes through it and outputs png or dds tiles.

Squishdds works great when you have the tiles already, of course.

BTW, graphicconverter can also convert PSD files to DDS tiles, but the last time i tested it, the dds compression it offered was horrible. Might be better now, though, that was more than a year ago.

- rthorvald

Runar... I've been waiting to give the tex tools a try. I'll try and get my head around all the 'how toos'!

Okay... just downloaded the F-TexTools... how do I use them/it? It all looks a bit complicated.

bh wrote:Runar... I've been waiting to give the tex tools a try. I'll try and get my head around all the 'how toos'!

Okay... just downloaded the F-TexTools... how do I use them/it? It all looks a bit complicated.

There is an extensive discussion of it on Celestial Matters. Start here:
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=44

... You can use the tools with any raw files you like, but Fridger has listed download links for a complete 64k Earth in this thread (including an Earth for each month of the year!)

Also, Fridger has made a "quick test" using small files (that are provided) so one can become familiar with it without having the computer working through the enormous files a full-scale run requires. It is here:
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewt ... 4&start=11

If i were you, i would start with that test ( i did).
I am a total newbie on the command line, but managed to do the job, so you should too - and our forum is always available...

As for the complement normalmap, you will find a very good guide on our website in Fridger??s section.

If you are as unfamiliar with the command line as i am, don??t be put off by the language - it will work if you follow it robotically like a recipe in a cookbook... Don??t look at the next step until you have done the previous... You will be able to produce the maps in an hour or so once you get started actually, the entire 64k level took me (or rather, the computer) somewhere around 10 minutes once i understood how to use the tools).

- Runar

Thanks Runar... The image on the CM front page did it for me! As an ex-cartographer I'm excited about giving these a go... I'm sure you kind folks will help me if I get stuck!

Need to get some free time. Oh well...