Celestia Forums

The topographic data acquired by JAXA's Kaguya mission has been released to the public, and now we finally can produce a decent normal map for the Moon. Here's are two images from Celestia using a 5760x2880 normal map and the high resolution albedo map from the standard Celestia package:


The second image is deliberately overzoomed to show the limitations of the data. For a better look at the possibilities of this new data set, see Jason Perry's video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMmSCQiuic

I explicitly did not reduce the normal map to a power of two size. Newer graphics cards fully support non-power-of-two textures, and I wanted to preserve as much detail as possible. The texture is compressed with DXT5 (aka BC3nm) compression. I started with the normal map produced by Mike Howard (see this thread: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/inde ... =6281&st=0 ), rotated it by 180 degrees, and compressed it with nvcompress (CUDA on.) There's more work to done with the polar regions, where some processing artifacts remain.

--Chris

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john Van Vliet wrote:and a 1 k copy of LALT_GGT_MAP.IMG < isis2std > to a png , min =0% max =100%

Why don't you use isis3 to convert the PDS/Img topography data to 16bit signed integer, as needed by my nms normalmap tool. Making a HIGH-QUALITY normalmap this way takes at best 2-3 minutes

See my post here:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=15407&start=3
Fridger

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Chris:

The moon looks great. When will the new normal map be available for download? Also, am I correct in understanding that your reference to the high albedo map of the moon refers to the Medres moon.pg texture in 1.6.0"

Frank

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John, I certainly would love to load your matched moon map. Please post it to motherlode. thanks

Frank

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