My new 8K 'flat' Mars texture is ready
.
While i worked with my old mars texture i found out that the image manipulation by Space Grafics caused a significant lose of details. Therefore i searched for a better mars texture and found this on PDS MAP-A-PLANET. But a really big problem was that this texture does't match with a bump map. Now i found a way to eliminate the distortions. OK this was one of the hardest jobs i ever did with Photoshop
. After some final color corrections (removeing the blue from dark areas, reduceing the saturation)
The shots was made with this adjustmenst: 8k DXT1 Mars map, 8k DXT3 normal map, no ambient light, OpenGL vertex program (no haze)
The next shot is a little demonstration how importent is a good bump map for my flat Mars.
Finaly my current thinking of the colors of Mars. This shot was made with OpenGL vertex program/NVidea combiners. I've included an orange filter in my cloud map to simulate the haze caused by the dust in the lower atmosphere. For Celestias haze effect i used a bright light-blue which shall simulate the haze caused by the upper atmosphere.
My next step will be a better 8k normal map. The current map is build from a 5760x2880 data set and a real 8k map will further improve the details.
Bye Jens
p.s. John Van Vliet, i think this is good demonstration how powerful the JPG format can be. All the pictures together have a size of only 318KB ( best PNG compression: 2,61MB / Celestia PNG's: 4,3MB ) and the quality is excelent for the web.
