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Well I have finally finished tinkering with Blue Mars texture and guess what. It turned green. I have managed to totaly teraform mars with this texture. Have a look at these.



Its also ready for download. Its in the form of a 4k.dds file that includes a cloud.dds as well. You can get it here. http://homepage.mac.com/impulseman37/.c ... p-link.zip
If you need the settings I use here is the link to the GreenMars settings.
http://homepage.mac.com/impulseman37/.c ... t-link.txt
Hope everyone enjoys this. I will be making a smaller one and work on a larger 8k is in progress but is going to take a while. I have to add all the crater lakes to the specmap. I even have a few to add to the 4k texture as well. If you look in the first picture you can see a crater lake at the top area of the Hellas sea that isn't spect out. As I update the texture I will post the info in here.

Wow. Looks lush. How about a night texture?
We can really go to town creating a future solar system...

but shouldnt there be more lakes and rain forests

Save the rain forests...send them to Mars!...Looks beautiful Don

That is just so very nice

Well I am going to add a few more lakes in the middle sections of the texture but you have to keep in mind that there are thousands of craters and they all can't be water filled. Also if Mars was teraformed it wouldn't be warm enough for tropical rain forests. It would most likely have temperate rain forest like we have here in the pacific northwest. Mainly fir, cyprus, cedar, and giant redwood trees. Redwood trees on Mars could probably grow to a thousand feet tall due to the lower gravity. Most trees would be taller there. The rest of the ground cover would be broad leaf trees, shrubs, and lots of grassy plains, and areas of moss covered ground and tundra. Besides the farther inland you go its going to get dryer. Also the Tharsis Platue is so high there wouldn't be much in the way of vegitation. We are talking about altitudes of over 10,000 feet here. There isn't much in the way of vegitation on Earth at these altitudes so it would be similar on Mars if we teraformed it with life from our home world. It would be covered in snow and ice most of the year and would have lichen and mosses growing in the summer months wich would be six months long. Remember that on Mars the seasons are twice as long as they here on Earth. It would be a great place for farms. Can you imagine 12 months of growing season. Only problen is you have to put up with six months of winter. I have always had a fasination with Mars and the idea of tranforming it into a world for our desendents to live on. Alot of what I did in the texture is what I learned from various books and articles I have read over the years. I have to thank the guys over at Space-Graphics.Com for the base texture that got me started on this idea.
There will be more to come.

Naah. No reason to put up with six months of winter.
Just hop on your skimmer and take the nearest frozen canal to the other hemisphere!

Oh,

Right.

No canals.



I guess Heinlein got it all wrong.

Im sure they will be dug during the course of terraforming the planet..Carl Sagan stated that this would be pretty much the only way to get the water to the more temperate equator regions...otherwise all the water would probably freeze again at the poles...

Now I wonder what the terraforming process would involve? something like the alien generator in total recall? Super hot metallic rods rammed into the polar caps? or some kind of weather control station that constantly ejects oxygen into the atmosphere...Would definately be a marvel of science...

Same as what happend on earth. Lots of little oxygen farting organisms. Except they will be genetically engineeried of course.

Ive got it working, looks fantastic. What is the best bumpmap to use? Im currently using the older BLUEMars-Bump.jpg. Also is there a key that i can turn the bumpmapping on and off with?

And a big (super mega ultra) reflector array in orbit to help lower central heating bills.

Well I can tell you what the article I have from an issue of Time a few years back said and coupled with what we know about where most of Mars water went.
The first thing that has to be done is raise the ambient tempurature. This would have to be done in two ways. Start melting the poles and introduce the Earths hated CFCs to increase the very weak if nonexistent greenhouse efect. Once the tempurature has reach the right point Mars is going to start helping. It looks like most of Mars' water didn't evaporate into space as we believed in the past. It looks like most of it is locked in deep permafrost a few meters under the surface. Once the temp gets to right level the permafrost will warm at the equator and start subliming into the atmosphere. As time goes by the more that melts and sublimes the higher the temp will climb. At this time we would start introducing other greenhouse gases such as methane. We can't start trying to put life into the ecosystem yet because even if they could survive the O2 they would put out would help cool the planet and that would set everything back. At this time we would start seeing the northern ocean reforming as well as color changes in the sky. It sould at this point have a lavander color and there should be a good quantity of clouds forming. We should start to see a rain cycle start but a great deal of the moisture would form as snow and ice. The main goal would be to get the atmosphere to a level equal to 30lbs per square inch. This is double the atmosperic presure on earth but this would be needed to maintain the greenhouse effect and humans and most if not all earth lifeforms could more than live with these conditions. Now the introduction of O2 creating lifeforms such as algae and certain bateria would be introduced. Of couse if we at this time have started geneticly engenering the life forms we might get them to double or triple there O2 out put. But we would never be able to get the O2 level to the levels we have here on Earth. On Earth O2 levels are about 17% of the air we breath. On MArs we would have to keep it below about 10%. Any higher and we would risk turning off the greenhouse effect. Another problem will be the Carbon cycle. On Earth CO2 is recycled from the atmosphere into rock and the oceans, then into the mantel, then to volcanoes and back to the atmosphere through valcanic gases and animals. On Mars we would have to figure out how to create a carbon cycle or all the CO2 in the atmosphere will end up in the bottom of the oceans and when it all gets removed from the atmospere the temp will drop and Mars will go into a deep iceage. Mars isn't techtonicly active as the Earth is so we would have to come up with some kind of solution or all the work would be lost. I have just given you a small sampling of what it would take to teraform the planet. It would take alot of time and resources but it would pay off in the end. One other thing to consider why Mars ended up the way it did is that it didn't have a large moon. I watched a program on the Discovery chanel about how Earth having a moon is the main reason we are here. I won't go into all the details of the show but to say the moon plays a big part in the life history of Earth isn't trivial. If Mars had a moon at least 500 miles in diameter it probably would have remained techtonicly active and it may not have fallen into its deep freeze. I don't know if we in the future would have the ability but if we could say yank the asteriod Ceres out of its orbit and park it in the right Mars orbit this might do the trick for getting Mars plumbing working again. The added streses of the gravitational pull on the surface could maybe get the volcanos going again and of course that would help as well. The volcanos on Mars are not the explosive type but there like the Hawwian ones. There sheild volcanos that pore lava across the surface.
Well I am starting to ramble here. If I can find my copy of Time with the article Maybe I will transcribe it and post it for everyone to read if they like. I am not sure if they would have the story on there websight. I might check that out. It was a really good article.

How about using the super big mirrors on "red mars" using the corhearent light produced by the dust storms to make ONE BIG COM. LASER

good job! that's good terraforming :D

Well I did a night texture but I am not happy with the results. As per usual the darn thing is just to bright and ruins the hole efect on the day side of the planet. I really wish Chris could figure out how to make the dang lights go out on the day side. Maybe some kind of inverted nightside texture mask or somthing. I was going to post a picture but as per usual I can't get into my gallery for the upload. Its been 3 days. It always happens over the weekend. Its the darn P2P software someone runs on the server when Chris isn't around. It shure keeps me from getting into gallery so I can't do a thing. I gave Chris a message about the problem will see if he can fix it again. Alas I seem to be the only person on the whole planet with this problem. Oh well we will try again tommorow.

Don. Edwards wrote: Alas I seem to be the only person on the whole planet with this problem. Oh well we will try again tommorow.

Nope, it affects everybody. But it seems to mess up the gallery and the nameserver the worst.

Don. Edwards wrote:Well I did a night texture but I am not happy with the results. As per usual the darn thing is just to bright and ruins the hole efect on the day side of the planet. I really wish Chris could figure out how to make the dang lights go out on the day side. Maybe some kind of inverted nightside texture mask or somthing.

I'll do something about the night lights problem within a day or two . . . The solution may require vertex programs, however . . . Not sure if I care to spend the effort to make it work on older hardware. And ATI users will get vertex program support in 1.2.6.

--Chris

Back on the Mars terraforming. I remember seeing somewhere theories about how our moon was formed after the collision of earth with a mars sized object, and that is why our moon is so big.
has anyone else heard of this?

Yes the show I saw was all about that. The scientist were calling the rouge planet Orpheus. It was suppose to be about Mars size and it did a double impact according to them. First it hit a glacing blow to Earth Mark 1 as they called it and then Earth gravitationaly grabed it and it pulled it back into itself. The ejecta from the impact went into orbit and coelested into our moon. That is the main reason why the moon is as big as it is. They also projected what would have happened if more than one moon would have formed. They said because they would have formed so close to each other that they would have disrupted there orbits and that they would either merge into a single moon or that one of them would have fallen out of orbit and hit the Earth. They seem to get the idea that a large single moon is almost required to get an Earth type planet. But of course they haven't seen any other Earth type planets to compare ours to. Makes you wonder if this is a real requirement for life to start and survive on a planet that there won't be to many Earth twins in the universe. Of course there whole idea could be wrong on that count. It is all just theory at this point. Its not like we can go back see if it really happened this way or what Earth was like before the impact. They seen to think Earth was like a thawed out Europa. Entirly covered with water with maybe a few islands here and there. They say if the impact wouldn't have happened we would all be smart fish or something totaly different.

Ok heres some pics of the updated GreenMars texture. I did some more color ajusting, and tweaked the specmap. I also brought one of the best features of the BluMars texture back that got lost in creation of GreenMars. The tranparency to the water so you can see the submerged terrain.

Here with clouds.

Over Tharsis again. This time without the clouds to show off the terrain and more of that submerged ground under water.

Agian with clouds.

Did someone ask for more crater lakes. Heres a few more. I am toying with the idea of making even more but adding them to the specmap is very time consuming.

Over Hellas again this time without clouds to show off fixed specturals on the missed lakes and to show off that land underwater.

Just another beauty shot. But what is that in orbit. Well I did mention something about moving Ceres into Mars orbit. I wanted to see what it would look like.

Here are the disapointing nightside lights.

As you can see they show very brightly into the daylight.
I will have the update ready for download saturday night. I am also making a few diferent color variations to show mars in diferent stages of terraforming and also a darker less saturated version for thoughs that want a toned down version and maybe a suprise or to. I'll keep everbody posted on the progress right here.

Don. Edwards wrote:As you can see they show very brightly into the daylight.
I will have the update ready for download saturday night. I am also making a few diferent color variations to show mars in diferent stages of terraforming and also a darker less saturated version for thoughs that want a toned down version. I'll keep everbody posted on the progress right here.

I just fixed a bug with night lights two days ago . . . They were always at full brightness whenever a specular map was used. Some work still needs to be done on night lights, but the fix should help a lot.

Anyhow, those images are gorgeous . . . Very nice work. I love the shading of the ocean areas near shore (can't really refer to the as 'continental shelves' on Mars).

--Chris