New colored Mars with clouds

[jim]

Hi all,

This shots show my attemt to give Mars a more realistic look. I visited several pages on the net to find out how Mars really looks and modified my mars map. Next i build a new cloud map. Further i set HazeColor to [ 1 0.65 0.47 ].







All the shot was made without ambient light.
Used maps: 8K "bumpless" mars, 8K normal map, 2K x 2K clouds.

Sorry i'm not able to upload all my maps because it's a little bit to large for my modem ;-(
But i think i find a way to make my clouds available.

Bye Jens

[billybob884]

you could just zip it and then put it up

[Darkmiss]

great work, looks very nice.
How big is the cloud file

[jim]

Hi all,

My web site is now at

http://home.arcor.de/jimpage/

Mike the zip-file with my mars maps would have a size of 24mb. That's to much for my modem and my web space.

Bye Jens

[Darkmiss]

these mars clouds look really great
thank you jim.

[jim]

Hi all,

I made a new try to give the mars more realistic colors. My intention was the texture should look like a Mars without atmosphere and the atmospheric haze should be added by the cloud texture and the haze effect. I've built two different colored clouds, but i'm not sure which is the better one or if something should be improved. I hope someone can help me.

Here is the first picture. The mars texture is in all shots the same.

1. globe: mars without haze and clouds.
2. globe: only with haze effect.
3. globe: haze and a more yellow cloud texture
4. globe: haze and a more red cloud texture



The next shots are close to the planet but without a shot with haze only.



Any comments are wellcome.

Bye Jens

[Don. Edwards]

Well Jim it looks good except for the great volcanoes. I know I have brought this up and even changed them in my texture and made it available but the volcanoes should be dark not lighter in color then the surrounding terrain. I don't know when this got introduced in the main textures from the beginning but I have a pretty good idea of how it happened. A good example is Space-Graphics new texture. I think in the process of adding detail to the original textures they used or superimposed the bumpmap image into the color maps and this brightened the mountains to the levels we see now. Again if you look over the NASA photos it is plainly clear the mountains are darker than the surrounding terrain. Know one seems interested in fixing this issue but me. But as my new rule of thumb if it isn't in the NASA photos than it is noncannon. Just my perspective on the issue.

[selden]

Don,

I don't think you should assume that because nobody says "boo" that people disagree with you or think that your Mars (or other) textures are "wrong". When people pick nits, don't forget all of the things that they *aren't* complaining about!

I know that's one of my personal characteristics. I'll look at a beautiful picture and mention the white dot where one pixel went awry. I won't say anything about the rest of it because I can't find anything wrong there. This can be a help in some situations: I beta-test software quite a lot.

One of my co-workers gave me a plush Eyore. It proudly sits on top of my monitor at work for all to see.

[Don. Edwards]

Jim,
One thing I failed to mention is the fact that your blending of the new Space-Graphics texture with your older one has done something unfortunate to the texture. If you look close it has increased the saturation value in Vales Marineris. It also did the same thing to the Hellas basin. In the texture I have been playing with on and off for that past few days I have managed to get the color back to a more normal level. Although the modifications I have done basically make the texture I am working on look almost like an entirely different texture. By looking at it you really would very guess that it was based from yours but it is. I have also mad a modified cloud map. I based it on your clouds and a blend of John Van Vliet's clouds. I added some clouds over Hellas because in many of the NASA photos they show cloud cover there. I also extended some clouds into the canyons of Vales Marineris.
Here is where I am at this point.


By the way is there any chance of you making your older bumpless version of your Mars texture available again. I am not sure I ever downloaded it and it would be great for reference.
Don.

[jim]

Hi Don,

Nice work your mars texture. I know that my Mars map is not perfect. My old bumpless Mars has other problem areas. The srong shading by Space Grafics has caused some lose of color information. This was compensated with the new unshaded texture from Space Grafics. If you want i will upload only for you my first bumpless Mars map whith unchanged colors. If I could I would send my Photo shop files (with all my masks) but 480MB for two files is not possible for me.

At the moment i have stoped my work on the Space Grafics based textures. I found a better and unshaded Mars map on PDS MAP-A-PLANET. But this texture has another problem these match not with a bump map. I'm not sure if there is a solution.

I'm enjoied that you have improved my mars clouds. My cloud map was only a first try to build a highres version and a lot of parts are quite fictional.

About the dark volcanos i have a different opinion. I agree with you that they are to bright on some textures. In my opinion the color and brightness should not significant differ from the surrounding terrain. I think the Nasa picture that shows the volcanos dark was made while a bright dust storm was around the volcanos.

By Jens

[Don. Edwards]

Hey jim,
I agree 480mb is just a little big. That’s like my 760mbs worth of textures for NASA. Everyone on the project I am sure is in texture size shock.
But because I am working on this for educational computers that don't have strong 3D cards I have cut all the textures back to 2k so the total is like 29mbs. But you can see the potential file size problem even for 8k .dds textures.
Now on the volcanoes. Take a look in the thread “ A Case For Dark Martian Volcanoes” and take a close look at all the pictures not just the valmar picture I posted earlier. In almost each and every picture the great volcanoes are substantially darker than the rest of the Tharsis rise. That’s why I went with a darker coloring. As I said I have Frank checking with someone at NASA and I will find out if it is right or wrong to color them that way. If it is wrong then I will change them but not to much. To much color shifting can ruin a great texture as I am sure you are aware.

Don.

[selden]

Don,

I trust you're including lores (512x256) and medres (1Kx512) JPEGs too.
That might be appropriate as a separate kit for those who only have dialup access. There are still a lot of older 3D cards in the field that can't do DDS.

[Don. Edwards]

selden,
Allthe textures for the NASA project so far are at 2k high quality .jpg. I will be making smaller files of course. The big textures are most likely going to get used be Celestia pros so to speak unless tere is a need for a speacial event or something.

[jim]

Hi Don,

Here is my "raw" version of bumpless mars. This texture was the base for all my later Mars maps.

> Link removed. I must save transfer volume. <

I hope this is what you want.

Bye Jens

[jim]

Hi all,

Now since a 16 bit elevation map for mars is available I played a little bit with the 5760x2880 data set and build a 8k normal. This is the result: (8k DXT1 Mars map + 8k DXT3 normal map + 4k clouds)



Ok I'm enthusiastic about the 16 bit format. That's what we need to create 8k or 16k normal maps. But the problems comes with the software which can handle this 16 bit format. Photoshop 6 can open this file format but supports only some basic function nothing that's usefull to create a normalmap. Next try was Gimp 1.2.4 for windows this highly praised software by some people of this forum. After some futile tries i search the web for more infos and found out that the standard version of Gimp supports no 16 bit per channel formats. The idea installing the needed plugin(s) was fast stop by reading the way to do this for a windows environment. Since I know that Gimp needs up to 4 time more memory for a picture than other photo editors I'm not good to speak about this software ( Ok it's better than MS Pain ). My last try was Corel Photo Paint 10 and i found what i need. Most filters are also disabled with the 16 bit files but the user defined filter works. With this filter it's possible to produce the red and green channel for a normal map. After some final work in Photo Shop and the resizing with Irfanview I get my new 8k normal map.

This is only a preview because i'm working on a new Mars this time not based one a Space Grafics texture.
The next project is a 8k color Moon (without stripes).

Bye Jens

[t00fri]

Hi all,

Now since a 16 bit elevation map for mars is available I played a little bit with the 5760x2880 data set and build a 8k normal. This is the result: (8k DXT1 Mars map + 8k DXT3 normal map + 4k clouds)



Ok I'm enthusiastic about the 16 bit format. That's what we need to create 8k or 16k normal maps. But the problems comes with the software which can handle this 16 bit format. Photoshop 6 can open this file format but supports only some basic function nothing that's usefull to create a normalmap. Next try was Gimp 1.2.4 for windows this highly praised software by some people of this forum. After some futile tries i search the web for more infos and found out that the standard version of Gimp supports no 16 bit per channel formats. The idea installing the needed plugin(s) was fast stop by reading the way to do this for a windows environment. Since I know that Gimp needs up to 4 time more memory for a picture than other photo editors I'm not good to speak about this software ( Ok it's better than MS Pain ). My last try was Corel Photo Paint 10 and i found what i need. Most filters are also disabled with the 16 bit files but the user defined filter works. With this filter it's possible to produce the red and green channel for a normal map. After some final work in Photo Shop and the resizing with Irfanview I get my new 8k normal map.

This is only a preview because i'm working on a new Mars this time not based one a Space Grafics texture.
The next project is a 8k color Moon (without stripes).

Bye Jens

I now have made a /phantastic/ 16k, ~16bit (dithered) normal map from the /final/ MOLA elevation data. Even the 8k, ~16bit are much better than what we had before!(Note unless Jens' 8k map, the one I made is from resizing the 16k bump map and thus is genuine 8k resolution). Much less artifacts and as I always emphasized, the 16bit grayscale dephts is precisely what was always needed!

I guess by tomorrow I can show first 16k results here.
Doing the 16k normal map is sort of tricky;-). The MOLA data are 4x132MB, i.e. quite a bit to handle...

I use some gimp-perl plugins that I wrote to merge the 4 maps together seemlessly...

Jens, I really do not understand what you are saying: the people who wrote Gimp are not STUPID! Are you really believing that they just vast a factor 4 more memory for NOTHING? Of course, this depends on the number of UNDO steps that you chose etc.

The NVIDIA photoshop normalmap plugin does indeed only work on 8bit RGB images. However, the Linux GIMP normal map plugin works fine in 16bit, but see below...

Bye Fridger

[Guest]

I should have added above, that Jens is correct that the standard GIMP internally works still in 8bit, yet it loads correctly 16bit depths images. There is a 16bit GIMP version under development.

What I did is after converting the MOLA *.raw format to 16bit *.tif with Photoshop, I dithered all images with Photoshop's internal 'diffusion dither'to 8bit before going on with GIMP. This gives almost 16bit emulation, no banding at all and very subtle shades of gray.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Sorry, in my above message (that I sent from my Win partition with IE), the Auto login was not active;-)

Bye Fridger

[HankR]

Here's a map of Mars with clouds from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. It's low-res and would need to be resized to use with Celestia, but it gives an idea of how Mars actually looked in April, 1999.

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02066

- Hank

[Don. Edwards]

HankR,
I may the first but I am sure I won't be the last to say that the NASA image is just a little green. The way NASA generates the green color chanel always has a more intense luminance factor so often there pictures look a little green. Fridger and others have pointed this out many times in the past. This image would at least need the Hue to be adjusted to the red a few notches. Plus the fact it is quite incomplete in its present form. Its something to work from but I personaly wouldn't use it as a texture.

Don.