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Great perspectives with new (hazy) bump&spec maps

Posted: 03.11.2002, 12:49
by t00fri
I want to give you a first glimpse of some truely spectacular
possibilities related to dynamical bumpmapping that are already now
"hidden" in the new 1.2.5preX version of Celestia. Experimenting with
dyn. bumpmapping with /haze/ activated is particularly rewarding.

Welcome to our little virtual (bumpmap & specmap) trip in the Peruvian
Andes;-). We start around sun rise and zoom into South America with
fairly nice weather, apart from a few pitoresque clouds (my clouds;-),
of course). We want to "travel" to the famous Peruvian lakes that are
still not yet illuminated at this early hour near the top leftish part
of the image, and partly hidden by clouds:

Image

Here is an "early morning zoom-in" on where we want to go;-)

Image

After a spectacular trip with the Peruvian railway from Lima through
this "moon-like" landscape and climbing above 5500 m altitude (!) we
arrive during the /afternoon/ quite close to lake Titicaca, the "big
blue" one that you see with nice specular sun reflections in the left
portion of the following image:

Image

Since years ago, I travelled extensively in this area, I still remember
well, how all this looks in reality...

Let us now focus on the three famous lakes that are visible on the image,
lake Titicaca (blue, left),the "small" lake Poopo (geen, middle) and
the fairly large salt desert "lake" (brown, bordered with a salt crust, right),
Salar de Uyuni. I have used Buzz' spec map (for a change) to illustrate
on the one hand how nice the two lakes (Titicaca and the green Poopo)
show the specular sun reflections. On the other hand, you also see,
that he forgot to select /brown/ waters (Salar de Uyuni)...;-)

Another reason for showing these nice views is to illustrate the
dramatically different illumination of the Andes (or other mountain
ranges) that dynamical bumpmapping produces at different times of the
day! Note also, that I have put great care in producing high quality
4k/8k bumpmap files that will soon be available at my Texture Foundry site.

Enjoy,

Bye Fridger

Sunset romantics on Mars: bump&spec&red haze

Posted: 03.11.2002, 17:02
by t00fri
Also for the RedMars textures, /dynamical/ bump&spec mapping together with
plenty of 'red haze' give great impressions. The examples below are
from my 4k RedMars texture with only unsharp masking and color
correction applied, but unlike my files in the Texture Foundry, there
is NO STATIC bumpmapping. The beautiful and very detailed 3d-bump effects are
entirely DYNAMICAL and from the RedMars elevation graymap, reduced to
8k. I show 2 sun raise/set scenes below, to emphasize the varying light
effects.

"Mars" "Sol"
{
Texture "mars4k.dds"
BumpMap "marsbump8k.jpg"
BumpHeight 55.0
SpecularTexture "mars4k-spec.dds"
SpecularColor [ 0.14 0.12 0.10 ]
SpecularPower 25.5
Color [ 1 0.75 0.7 ]
HazeColor [ 0.28 0.24 0.2 ]
HazeDensity 0.90
Radius 3394
...

}

Enjoy,

Bye Fridger

Image

Posted: 03.11.2002, 21:51
by Sum0
If only I had Rassilon's "jaw hits floor" emoticon...
That is just stunning!
From now on, my only wish is that someday i'll be able to see that with my own graphics card...

Posted: 03.11.2002, 22:39
by Rassilon
Simply amazing...you can almost see the trees :mrgreen:

Posted: 04.11.2002, 08:42
by Buzz
Hi Fridger,

Beautiful screenshots! Now about the spec map and brown lakes: I did not select colour ranges myself, but used a map creation site: http://life.csu.edu.au/cgi-bin/gis/Map
I'll see if I can add this lake in another way... By the way, are you sure it's not all mud? :wink:

Great.

Posted: 04.11.2002, 14:10
by Axel
Hi,

impressive! Which kind of fps do you get on your (GeForce1?) hardware around Earth and around Mars?

Thanx, Axel

Great.

Posted: 04.11.2002, 15:18
by t00fri
Axel wrote:Hi,

impressive! Which kind of fps do you get on your (GeForce1?) hardware around Earth and around Mars?

Thanx, Axel


I have a Geforce 2 GTS/32 MB. I get with 1600x1200/16bit for the above images 12-15 fps with a 4k bumpmap texture/4k main texture/4k spec, while with an 8k bumpmap the performance is not quite smooth anymore, unless I work at small field. Normally I use 4k bumpmap to maneouver and then switch to 8k when I am close by. Unfortunately, the bumpmap cannot be a DXT file, thats the problem...


Bye Fridger

Posted: 23.11.2002, 00:14
by Mikeydude750
Wow....I have to wait until February to get my new computer, with a GFFX Ultra 5800 =)