Celestia Forums

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Hey John,
Pretty good atempt. I downloaded it and started playing with it right off the batt. I am working on a Mars project so your texture gives me the idea that I do need to make more crater lakes. The only suggestion I could give you is to take the color saturation level down 50%. This gives your texture a much more realistic apearance. There are a few errors here and there but for the most part its a fine job. If you have a chance take a look at the animated gif I posted under "See Mars Get Terraformed" to see what I have been doing. The gif is made up of screen captures of all 19 of the sequential textures.
Don.

john Van Vliet wrote:I Put up a new mars with water and grass texture
8192x4096 .png


A small1k tex

Why again do you force people to register at your site in order to see your textures??

I certainly won't...

Bye Fridger

I too find that a bit of a bother. Just let us in and stop making everyone jump through hoops to get in Jonh.

Well it seems John can't take any constructive criticism about his site or his textures without throwing a fit. He has summarily erased my account from his server. So In the future he can’t expect to hear many good things from me. This kind of childish behavior is just out of place in a community like this. I for one will not be using any of his textures in the future and his bookmark has been erased from my favorites list.
Sorry John but until you come down off your high horse you won’t be making any friends here fast.
Don.

P.S.
I do hope I wrong about this but what is one to think. Just after I made a comment about the login procedures and about the texture I can no longer log into the site. HMMMM!!

Don. Edwards wrote:Well it seems John can't take any constructive criticism about his site or his textures without throwing a fit. He has summarily erased my account from his server. So In the future he can’t expect to hear many good things from me. This kind of childish behavior is just out of place in a community like this. I for one will not be using any of his textures in the future and his bookmark has been erased from my favorites list.
Sorry John but until you come down off your high horse you won’t be making any friends here fast.
Don.

P.S.
I do hope I wrong about this but what is one to think. Just after I made a comment about the login procedures and about the texture I can no longer log into the site. HMMMM!!

I might try to register as a cross check;-)?

Bye Fridger

I did ask this question to john a while back
and told of how off putting it was, but nothing changed.

John, your work is great, the web site is great.
But i havent visited your site since you put up the register thing.
I get asked to register here, there, and everywhere.
so i tend not to, unless its really nesessary.

Well he did kill the account because I was able to create a new one.
Takes all kinds I guess. Well enough on this. Time to move forward.
All I wanted from him anyway was his dds Mars normal map but I made my own.
Don.

Don, can you send me a copy of your mars normal map, but 4k if you can.
and a question: what mars textures do you use? becasue the one i have is with shadows. the only one without shadows is the one that comes with celestia

ElPelado,
The textures I use are from Space-Graphics.com. They do have shadows, but I always put the sun to the right side of the screen to compensate ans so the shadows are alligned properly. As I said before unless somone is willing to edit every single shadow out of the textures we just have to live with them.

Don. Edwards wrote:ElPelado,
The textures I use are from Space-Graphics.com. They do have shadows, but I always put the sun to the right side of the screen to compensate ans so the shadows are alligned properly. As I said before unless somone is willing to edit every single shadow out of the textures we just have to live with them.

There was a pretty nasty bug in the 1.3.0 code with respect to normal-mapping. This was the main reason for an often rather unsatisfactory or incorrect appearance of bump/normal maps. The fact that the main textures are often already shaded, is of far less importance. After some joint analysis, Chris has now corrected this once for all in the CVS version. It works amazingly well! The fixes will be part of a 'dot' release (1.3.1) that will appear quite soon.

Linux users can of course already profit from the new amazing quality display via /standard/ normal maps, by simply compiling the CVS version;-)...

Bye Fridger

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Yeah...I was going to post there's really no need for any crap on this forum. We're all adults... well most of us. Maybe John's isp isn't working... You have to give the guy the benefit of doubt. Let's not get too hasty!

There's soo much talent here to have it ruined for everyone on petty squabbles.

There!

Regards to all...bh.

That's Cool John. I just wasn't shure what was up. I didn't hear anything and I guess maybe I jumped a little to quick to conclusions. Its good to hear you changed the login thing. I think you will probably get a little more trafic this way.
And I wasn't really pissed but maybe a litttle miffed. There is a diference.

Fridger wrote:There was a pretty nasty bug in the 1.3.0 code with respect to normal-mapping. This was the main reason for an often rather unsatisfactory or incorrect appearance of bump/normal maps. The fact that the main textures are often already shaded, is of far less importance. After some joint analysis, Chris has now corrected this once for all in the CVS version. It works amazingly well! The fixes will be part of a 'dot' release (1.3.1) that will appear quite soon.

This is very nice to here that this bug is now finally fixed .

john Van Vliet wrote:YOU NO LONGER HAVE TO LOG IN
but i am re organising the downloads
sary for the inconvinance

I did not mean to piss anyone off

All the "slow connected" people could love your site if you would do a little bit web optimization:

- Resize your thumbnail pictures to the correct dimensions.
- Save all the web pictures in optimized JPG format.
- Zip all the downloads
- Don't build big texture packages

I think this should be not to difficult and would also reduce dramatically the traffic.

Bye Jens

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John,
I think what Jim was trying t say was to use a .jpg for displaying the texture on your site not as the download option. Because you tend to use a large .png for a thumbnail it takes a long time to load. If you used a smaller .png or a .jpg for the thumbnail images on your site it would increase the speed of your site load times several times over. Just a thought to consider.

Hi John,

Don. Edwards wrote:I think what Jim was trying t say was to use a .jpg for displaying the texture on your site not as the download option. Because you tend to use a large .png for a thumbnail it takes a long time to load. If you used a smaller .png or a .jpg for the thumbnail images on your site it would increase the speed of your site load times several times over. Just a thought to consider.

Yes, exact this was what I want say.

john Van Vliet wrote:Hi jim sary but no .jpg -- I Hate them -- They ruen the pic .
All the artifacs left over from compresion
If you jpg a 8k texture it is then worse than using a 2k tex.

John, JPG is not that bad file format if you know how to use it ;-).
When you save a picture to JPG then there is in everey photo editor a save option dialog where you can adjust the compression rate (quality). That means if you use the best quality (lowest compression) then you will not remark any artifacs. Please try it open a very detialed picture in Photoshop zoom in to 200% than save it as JPG and use the preview option in the save dialog. Try different quality settings and you will easy find out the best compromise between picture quality and file size.

Bye Jens

p.s. I use both formats PNG and JPG depend on the situation.

Hi John,

Here is an example.

First the PNG file: 112 KB


And now a JPG with the best possible quality: 94,6 KB


And now a JPG with "only" average quality (the best compromise): 34,3 KB


The last picture is my favorite for the web.
Can you find differences between the first JPG and your PNG ?

Bye Jens

i don't really see any difference. at all. i mean nothing what-so-ever. but thats jut my opinion...