Celestia Forums

Hi everyone,

I've been out of Celestia board for some years (yep, a loooong break) and in my return I discovered that texture resolutions have improved so much I could ever imagine. Looking and searching for the forums lead me to find the magnificient F-textools and decided to give it a go and try what can be done right at this time. Here are some screens of a 64K VT map of the Moon. Note that the texture isn't manipulated nor enhanced in any way from the original sources as it is not intented to be a fine job. F-textools work incredibly well in my old system (P4 1.5GB ddr ram). As the title says, I'm just testing.

Hey praesepe,

great to read you again after a long break! I am particularly happy that my F-TexTools worked fine for you! I coded them precisely with the purpose to allow people making "monster" textures even with average "home" computers.

Your 64k moon closeups are gorgeous!! What data did you use precisely?

In case you are interested, have a look at our Celestial Matters site,

Forum: http://forum.celestialmatters.org/

Texture tools:
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=273
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewforum.php?f=6

Tutorial (Nmtools):
http://www.celestialmatters.org/?q=node/10

WebSite: http://www.celestialmatters.org/

where you find all updates and lots of discussions of my F-TexTools/Nmtools. In their latest version 2.0, all tools can directly output highest quality DXT format (besides Png) (including the normalmap format DXT5nm).

Note, while in earlier versions of my tools (1.0x) no bugs were found by the many testers, they were about a factor of TWO slower than the upgrade versions 1.5 and 2.0! So if you still used 1.0x you better upgrade...

Fridger

Glad to see you again Doctor!

As I said, your F-TexTools worked like a charm for me altough I used an old release (1.0pre4). I didn't know the existence of newer versions so I'm going to download 2.0 and have another try since producing tiles in DXT format would avoid VT's growing so much in size.

The data used for creating this VT was the 92160x46080 map from the USGS Clementine mission scaled down to the nearest power of 2 using tx2pow2 -> 65536x32768. The clementine map looks quite complete altough is has lots of artifacts, mostly seams due to different ilumination/exposures and a few missing areas which I don't know If they were ever mapped.

I also checked Celestial Matters. All content and data seems to be very organised there and always with a scientific overview that I like to achieve in my procedures, lots of thanks for the tip.

Hi praesepe,

have a look here: http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=315

I presently took a break off some other Qt based coding and started with a Qt GUI for my tools. . Personally, I cannot understand peoples' "respect" about commandline programs, but since Qt is crossplatform and the next Celestia version will have a Qt interface, a Qt GUI might be worth the effort...


Fridger

Great shots praesepe... good to see you back...

Those are just beautiful!

]Thanks all for your kind comments

Ok, I've done a second try and these are the results. As you can see I couldn't resist and made some work on the source data, applying some color to the original grayscale map and filling the missing areas with some data of different resolution which is far from perfect but desirable to black patches or cloning/faking data. There are a lot of artifacts/seams that should be fixed to improve it. The VT was created using the latest F-TexTools available (2.0) producing DXT1 tiles which saved up to 3x space (average) compared to PNG format.

Wow. That's impressive. Any chances of releasing your work?

Hungry4info wrote:Wow. That's impressive. Any chances of releasing your work?

Hungry,

as you know well, this will lead to a stop of the development of my tools and their Qt GUI (in preparation) ...If you guys are too lazy to use my tools, why should I develop them in the first place?

But it would be great if praesepe would publish a link to the original Moon imaging data that he used with my tools. Then everybody has all that is needed.

The result of running the original with my tools is exactly the same and goes even faster than downloading the big tile archive

Fridger

Ah, but even with Bob Hedgewood's tutorial, I am unable to understand how to use your tools.

Hungry4info wrote:Ah, but even with Bob Hedgewood's tutorial, I am unable to understand how to use your tools.

Now you know my pain.

Hello,

t00fri wrote:The result of running the original with my tools is exactly the same and goes even faster than downloading the big tile archive

There is a little inexactitude.
It is only the limit if we want to do that an infinite number of times.
If we need only this beautiful texture of the moon, add a month (maybe it is a little exaggerated) to understand how to proceed.

But with the new GUI in preparation, it should be a breeze.

A GUI makes difficult things simpler in appearance and encourages novices to try to understand when they have left otherwise.

I am confident that Fridger will find the motivation to develop his interface and that all those who want will manage to use it.

And maybe someone will find the motivation to make a tutorial for it.

t00fri wrote:But it would be great if praesepe would publish a link to the original Moon imaging data that he used with my tools. Then everybody has all that is needed.

Yes indeed!
Praesepe? Please?

I think the new gui ftex tools is going to be great for everyone to use!
Great shots Praesepe.

t00fri wrote:But it would be great if praesepe would publish a link to the original Moon imaging data that he used with my tools.

Indeed!

Hungry4info wrote:Ah, but even with Bob Hedgewood's tutorial, I am unable to understand how to use your tools.

@Hungry:

You have always impressed me as an alert young man, who's eager to learn...
Many people have succeded already, without being software experts.

cartrite has even written a script for the Windows cmd shell, where you just need to click and get your final result after a little while. This could easily be modified for the Moon, once I know the respective link and filename of the input data file.

Steeeeeve!?

But even without a script I am willing to type out for everyone the required command lines that can simply be copied one-by-one to the Windows cmd shell with the mouse/cursor.

The Moon is considerably simpler, since there are no specular textures to handle.

And not to forget....at the end of it, there is this good feeling of achievement, bcause
you have learned something . And next time, you will just laugh about why you had problems in your first attempt.

@jogad:

For the Moon one only needs to type ONE F-TexTools command per tile level...

To zip-compress the resulting multi GB tile archive and to upload it is usually VERY slow and takes many hours (upload is dead slow!). To download and unpack the same multi GB archive takes also pretty long (possibly several hours!) and represents an undue network load.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To copy the few needed commands from the browser screen and run them with a 64k input takes at best 15-20 minutes on an old local computer! If you want directly highest quality DXT output instead of PNG tiles, it takes a little longer. For fast and still good quality DXT compression the whole job is even faster than 15-20 minutes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Fridger

Very nice work, impressive.

I could not agree more with Fridger. I wouldn't mind uploading this VT somewhere and share it with all of you as I always done with all my little contributions but It would take several hours to do as the whole thing weights around 1.1GB. Also, I don't have anywhere to store it as my personal space on shatters is not working at the momment and If it did, bandwidth usage could also be an issue.

Downloading the source data and applying the necessary tools provided by Fridger is the fastest process to have your own VT created in a short time.

I am going to write a little instructions for making this as easy as possible:

Files
-----
- Source data -> Here

- F-TexTools 2.0 -> Here

- Gdal -> For either Linux or Windows -> Here

Process
---------
1.- Create a temporary folder (i.e "tmp") and create all the VT sublevels inside ("level0", "level1", "level2", "level3", "level4", "level5") and drag the source data (UVVIS_Clementine_Basemap_v2_ll.jp2) file there.

2.- Open your cmd (Windows-Start->run->cmd.exe) or your prefered Linux terminal and go to the temporary folder you created.

3.- Copy and paste the following code into your cmd shell/terminal



Note for Windows users: Make sure to add the "bin" subfolder of your gdal installation to your PATH environment.

This will produce VT tiles in PNG format, if you want them in DXT just replace "txtiles" command for "txtilesdxt".

Two "click and go" batch files for autoprocessing are available here-> PNG tiles or DXT tiles

Praesepe,

thanks VERY much for the links and your effort of setting up the step-by-step instructions!

Fridger

I DON?T agree with you.It?s ABSURDELY COMPLICATED to generated a map with F-Tex Tools,take a huge space in HD and take many hours to end.I tried to made maps using the program,but I gave up,because it locks down or give some kind of error.I am waiting for AGES for a finished texture to download,but the only options are this DIY.Continuing this,I will have to give up Celestia entirely. Besides this,my system is Windows Vista X64 and DOS system works very badly on this system.Please find a way to become this texture available!

praesepe wrote:I could not agree more with Fridger. I wouldn't mind uploading this VT somewhere and share it with all of you as I always done with all my little contributions but It would take several hours to do as the whole thing weights around 1.1GB. Also, I don't have anywhere to store it as my personal space on shatters is not working at the momment and If it did, bandwidth usage could also be an issue.

Downloading the source data and applying the necessary tools provided by Fridger is the fastest process to have your own VT created in a short time.

I am going to write a little instructions for making this as easy as possible:

Files
-----
- Source data -> Here

- F-TexTools 2.0 -> Here

- Gdal -> Linux or Windows

Process
---------
1.- Create a temporary folder (i.e "tmp") and create all the VT sublevels inside ("level0", "level1", "level2", "level3", "level4", "level5") and drag the source data (UVVIS_Clementine_Basemap_v2_ll.jp2) file there.

2.- Open your cmd (Windows-Start->run->cmd.exe) or your prefered Linux terminal and go to the temprary folder you created.

3.- Copy and paste the following code into your cmd shell/terminal

Code: Select all

 gdal_translate -of png UVVIS_Clementine_Basemap_v2_ll.jp2 Clementine.png
png2bin < Clementine.png > clementine.bin
tx2pow2 1 92160 < Clementine.bin > level5\64k.bin
tx2half 1 65536 < level5\64k.bin > level4\32k.bin
tx2half 1 32768 < level4\32k.bin > level3\16.bin
tx2half 1 16384 < level3\16k.bin > level2\8k.bin
tx2half 1 8192 < level2\8k.bin > level1\4k.bin
tx2half 1 4096 < level1\4k.bin > level0\2k.bin
cd level5
txtiles 1 65536 5 < 64k.bin
cd ..
cd level4
txtiles 1 32768 4 < 32k.bin
cd ..
cd level3
txtiles 1 16384 3 < 16k.bin
cd ..
cd level2
txtiles 1 8192 2 < 8k.bin
cd ..
cd level1
txtiles 1 4096 1 < 4k.bin
cd ..
cd level0
txtiles 1 2048 0 < 2k.bin
cd ..


Note for Windows users: Make sure gdal installation folder is in your PATH environment.

This will produce VT tiles in PNG format, if you want them in DXT just replace "txtiles" command for "txtilesdxt".

Two "click and go" batch files for autoprocessing are available here-> PNG tiles or DXT tiles

danielj wrote:I DON?T agree with you.It?s ABSURDELY COMPLICATED to generated a map with F-Tex Tools,take a huge space in HD and take many hours to end.

Daniel,

since you did not succeed, you can't know how long it takes, right? I tell you that the whole Moon texture package takes 15-20 min on an old computer, depending a bit on the output format and the desired quality! If you use the F-TexTools yourself, the required HD space is exactly the same, after you deleted the input texture. To first upload and then to download and unpack 1.1GB certainly takes much longer than 15-20 min!

Why do you make statements that you never checked out personally!?

I tried to made maps using the program,but I gave up,because it locks down or give some kind of error.I am waiting for AGES for a finished texture to download,but the only options are this DIY.Continuing this,I will have to give up Celestia entirely. Besides this,my system is Windows Vista X64 and DOS system works very badly on this system.

Bob Hegwood and various other users also have Vista X64 and managed perfectly to complete the VT generation task. How come that in their case, the DOS shell worked fine, while you claim that DOS works very badly with Vista?

Please find a way to become this texture available!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The 64k monster VTs are NOT part of Celestia, so please don't request anything from anybody, if you are unwilling to learn how to use the tools.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Fridger