Celestia Forums

I saw the huge earth texture on the site. It looks grate but can somebody make it into a raparond for me.
I made a basic one streched the 2 ends together and my grafix card(Gforce 4sx ) andeled it like a dream.
If anyone gets around to it pleas let me no!

what are you talking about?
Celestia does the wraping of the texture around sherical objects not the texturemap creator. All texture maps are flat.

My guess would be that Auscreely has mistaken the Celestia ScreenShots (showing the textures in use) for the texture files themselves.

It is true that it is not "trivial" to generate texture files. They have to be created in the aspect ratio known as "simple cylindrical projection" so that the proportions of features are reproduced properly when the texture map is wrapped around a sphere.

yes i saw the texture in use, but were can i get a flat texture of that monster file(12,000x16,000) it looks so kool but i cant get the flat version of the image. pleas if enyone noes were it is pleas post it!

Thank you.
Auscreely

For one thing you will never get that texturte to load at that size. You will have to resize it.
It is next to imposible for us to know what texture you are speaking of in the first place. How about posting a link to the website so we can see if it has already been done. Such as, did you see the image at BlueMarble or another site like it. If so these textures have already been made and links to them are thoughout the forum. There are links to some very big textures in the Celestia Textures section of the forum. Go there and the link to them is at the top Download Large DDS textures here. I have also just made a texture available that is quite nice. Its only 4k in size but is very detailed and the link to download it is also in the Celestia Textures section under the link The New Earth Textures From Space-Graphics. Scoll to the bottom and you will find the link there. The largest textures anyone has made for Celestia are 16384x8192. Thats all any of the newest video cards can work with at this time and this means you better have at least 128mb of DDRVRAM. Anything less in the amount of memory and you are better off topping out out using textures of 8192x4196 and these are going to give even the fastest GeForce4 Ti's a good work out. There is a reason you can only find textures at smaller sizes. Its that most Celestia users want to be able to navigate in the program without waiting five minutes for the video card to draw the next frame.
Good luck with your search but I feel you are being very overoptimistic thinking you could get those textures to work in the first place.

Auscreely
I just reread your first post again and relised something. What the heck is a GeForce4 SX???
As far as I know there are only MX and TI models. If you mean you have a GeForce4 MX 420,440 model card you probably only have 64megs of vram to play with anyway. None of the MX model cards have 128mbs of VRAM. You can only run textures of the maximum size of 8192x4096. Your best bet is to use dds texture files instead of jpg or png image files. Useing any texture that size requires Celestia to make the videocard compress the image and slows down the draws and increases the amount of time it takes for the object to be drawn. DDS files are already compressed so this will speed up Celestia's load time a bit but not a hole lot. Sorry to burst your buble but you will never be able to use anything over an 8k texture. You might get a 16k texture to work but I think you would have to shut off all the other features in Celestia just to get it to load. In the end it wouldn't be worth it anyway. 8k textures are really quite detailed and can thay can be quite beautiful if they are made right.

I'm hopeful that eventually Celestia might support a segmented texture map scheme, in which a humongous hires texture map would be segmented into multiple textures of reasonable size, and only those segments needed to display the portion of the surface visible at any given time would need to be loaded. As the visible portion of the surface changed, segments would be swapped in as needed (something like virtual memory). I believe this approach could allow arbitrarily high resolution textures, with an essentially fixed texture memory requirement and performance cost.

- Hank

Sory I did mean TI
Now wat do you mean it cant handle it, it loads it just a litle slow and i cant use the bumpmap at the same time or the clouds, or pixl shaders.

I found it on this forum somewere it was called bigest earth texture (1,600X1,200)

sory I cant find it right now

Its simple math. If you have a 64meg video card start adding up the size of each texture. I believe the 16k.dds file takes up 32megs of VRAM. Now add your bumpmap and cloudmap. Now you have to take into consideration the rest of the thing being drawn. The background stars galaxy clouds and the other galaxies. Its going to take up most if not all your VRAM. I not saying you can't use the 16k texture I just trying to say a really good 8k texture is more than enough and you you still get to run with all features enabled and the system still had some VRAM to play with. Just because you can do something doesn't mean its the best thing you can do. I am sure 24k textures look fantastic but I know its not feasable for me to try and run one on my system. The larger the texture the greater the load on everything in your system. Your hard drive has to load it to RAM then it gets passed to the videocard and all it means is you run out of head room quick. Maybe when we all have 4GHz systems and 512mb NVidia NV40 video cards we can start really having some fun. Buy then we are going to have to give Celestia a gig of hard disk space as well. If you can run the 16k texture then great. If you can't its not the end of the world. I myself can't even get the download links to work so I could try the 16k with my new Ti4200. I did try it with a 64mb GeForce2 and it was ok but I felt I lost to much for the privilage. I will stick to really good 4k & 8k textures.

Wat i wqanted to do is zoom in realy far, the 8k texture is wat i use when I am not experimenting.
and my nabor has a radion card (9200 128mb of vram) and it runs just fine with the cloud map and the night lights.
I would have goten a radion but the compatibilty is realy bad (no pixl or vertex shaders) so I got the Gforce4 but then i cant use the huge texture.

Also I have ben trying to get a bump map to work but i ges it is to big but when i scale it back it dosent make a difrance
wat can i do?

Oh for petes sake. Get it here were its always been.
Earth 16k dds ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celes ... 6k_dds.zip
The server isn't always up but thats were the file is and has always been. If you would have looked in the very first thread called [Download Large DDS textures here] you would have found it weeks ago and maybe all this wouldn't have been needed. I just downloaded the 16kdds.zip the other day and have tried it so I know it works. I would recomend useing something like download accelerator to manage the download. If you can't get it from the ftp site I might give you a window of opertunity to download it off my iDisk. But I will only do this as a last resort as the file is quite big. And yes it can be run on a 64meg video card but it is butt slow and the diference between an 8k and 16k still isn't enough to make me use this this beast all the time. If your looking for anything bigger than 16k your not going to find it. No one has made one and I doubt anyone is going to anytime soon as there just isn't a video card that handle a 32k texture even in dds format. Hope this helps and I hope your system doesn't chug to slow when using it.
As for the bumpmap problems, that has and is discused in many other threads. I think you need to use the search tool and start looking through the older posts for the info you need. Its silly for us in the forum to keep repeating ourselves every week over the same topics when all you need to do is do a topic search before you start posting and asking questions that have been asked and answered in the past. This helps streamline the forum and keeps all the excess post from being needed. Good luck and remember to search before you post..

That is not the texture I saw.

It was 14,000x12,000 or sompthing like that, and it worked just fine. It is on this forum somewere

I can't find it

A 14,000x12,000 will not work in Celestia. That is not a power of 2 size texture. It has to be 8192x4096, 16,384x8192 or 32,768x16,384. The texture may have started out that size but it was resized. I have no dout about that. The only other texture you could be talking about is the super big BlueMarble texture that is broken into pieces. When assembled it would be I believe around 28,000x16,000 or something close to that. Now even if I would take the time to put this beast together you still couldn't use it. It would have to be sized to fit the requirments of Celestia. Whitch would meaning taking it down to 16,384x8192 and there goes all that extra resolution. Besides do you know how much system RAM is needed to crunch a texture of that size. You would need at least a Gig of system RAM just to assemble the thing and thats not even considering trying to convert it to a usable DDS file for Celestia. As it stands now it takes a Gig of RAM to make a 16,348x8192 DDS file. Can you imagine the memory requirments for a 32,786x16,384, at least double that. I don't know anyone around here with 2GIGs of system Ram do you? Please give up this wish to use a texture that just can't be used with Celestia at this time. The best you can hope to use is the 16,384x8192 and its more than enough for now. Trust me no one using Celestia is using anything over a 16,384x8192 period. Until you can find the thread with the location of said texture and the person you claimed to be using it this is a finished subject as far as I am conserned. Please let get realistic here. Enough is enough.

The 16k DDS in the first sticky topic in this part of the forum, called "download large DDS textures here", is the largest texture available:
http://ennui.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=889
That's 16384 pixels. Seems big enough.

Hey Buzz,
I told him that but he insists there is this real big texture that can be run. As you can see from the posts I have tried to explain why he can't really use anything over a 16k texture anyway. I have all but given up trying to explain the the whole texture size and requirment thing to him but he just won't listen. He keeps saying somewhere here in the forum is a link to a monster texture. I am almost 100% sure he is thinking of the very large 2 or 3 piece texture from BlueMarble. But he has got it in his head that thing will work with Celestia. I don't know about you but I don't even think a Pro Class system with multiple Xeons and the top of the line Nvidia Quadro cards put crunch this thing. Its to big. Oh well I have tried to help him but as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't get then to use there head. I give up.

Hi Don,

I feel with you, but I always try to stay businesslike... I think he is talking about the blue marble tiffs. http://www.visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11656

Auscreely: these are 21600x21600, and would combine to form a 43200x21600 texture. Scaled down to a power of two it would become 32768x16384. Good luck

Yeh and the 2 halves are over 400 megs each. He is going to really have a time with these.

If you have a
resolution of 1024 pixels accross your screen
with a field of view of 45
the minimum altitude to get the best resolution of earth is around:
12000km with a 4k texture
6000km with a 8k texture
3000km with a 16k texture
1500km with a 32k texture
below these altitude the picture is blurred

Is there larger earthnight dds files than 8k? Maybe 16k?
Or earthcloud_dds-files like 8k or somthing!

Do you know where I can find it?