Celestia Forums

Hey all,

the Mercury texture of Celestia is in quite a neglected state and
surely far from being close to reality.

Since I happen to have the biggest available (11k) 'limit of
knowledge'-masked Mercury texture from the Mariner 10 mission, I
started some work on it.

-- size rescaling to 8k
-- careful 'healing' of the /many/ visible artifacts from composing the
texture as a 'mosaic'
-- filling the 'empty' half essentially with a flipped image of the
available half. Of course, the 'limit of knowledge' mask may always
be overlayed by toggling the '+' key (CVS-version)

-- applying the usual general enhancement tricks

-- since Mercury colors are presumably /very/ similar to those of our Moon, I
computer-mapped my reference Apollo-Moon photo to the Mercury
grayscale image.

Altogether, the 8k texture now looks pretty 'even' and certainly
somewhat better than the Moon texture from the Clementine mission...
No 'bad' areas anywhere.

So here are two shots from the 8k texture, to give you a flavor of
what may be done. There is no bump-map applied, only a little bit of
spec lighting

Bye Fridger

Looking great
Presepea has made a great 4k Mercury so far
where he mirrored the half texture information.

Darkmiss wrote:Looking great
Presepea has made a great 4k Mercury so far
where he mirrored the half texture information.

Umm are you referring to me?

I've never created a map for Mercury, in fact, I don't have the source image from de USGS to do so. Maybe you are referring to John Van Vliet's Mercury texture, who mirrored the available data and cloned some more from the Moon map

praesepe wrote:

Darkmiss wrote:Looking great
Presepea has made a great 4k Mercury so far
where he mirrored the half texture information.

Umm are you referring to me?

I've never created a map for Mercury, in fact, I don't have the source image from de USGS to do so. Maybe you are referring to John Van Vliet's Mercury texture, who mirrored the available data and cloned some more from the Moon map :?

Indeed;-), could not find mercury on your site/gallery

Bye Fridger

Oops! I also forgot to say that your texture looks stuning great Fridger! well, as usual

Looks great!!

Are you gonna do bumpmap for it?

JackHiggins wrote:Looks great!! :D

Are you gonna do bumpmap for it?

Thanks everybody for your comments. Things are just at the start with Mercury. Sure, I shall make a bump-map, too. As you all know, bad bump-maps are quick affairs, good ones take a little longer...

I am also experimenting with improving the looks of the new 'limit-of-knowledge' masks. Clearly, the mask color should match the colors at the boundary or the average color of the body. So far Grant did simple sharp mask boundaries which are scientifically most precise but look not so pleasing. I am experimenting with various blurs of the alpha channel mask. Any further ideas welcome!


Bye Fridger

Fridger...hello there me old skip...Mercury! Foobah! Lets have some Moon maps. The closest body we have to Earth and nothing that can match your 8k Mars texture?

Regards...b(Neil Armstrong)h .

Hey Fridger,
Finally someone is going to fix Mercury. I found a higher resolution version of the Mercury texture that we all presently use and found some interesing anomolies. For starters, I don't have a problem with whom ever made the texture using the back side of our Moon to fill in the blanks but has anyone noticed that the shadows shift. The part of the texture that is based on real Mercury data has shadows in one direction and the cloned Moon data has then going the oposite direction. It was probably just a quick oversite. I can't wait to see how you tackle this. All I know is that it has to be better than what we have.

Don.

I already have
- a 8k mercury
- a 16k mars
- a 8k venus
- a 16k earth
- a 8k moon
- a 8k europa
- a 4k io
and lots of 2k bodies
(But I can't remember exactly where I got them, I can check tho if someone is interested)
Are there better textures outthere ?

Calculus,
Where on Earth did you get an 8k Venus texture, pun intended, and how good is it. I have been looking for a high-res Venus texture for a few days now. I need one for part of the NASA project I am on. Details please, like where is it at or can you make it available? I am desperate and hate to have to use a low-res 2k texture. Waiting in anticipation.

Don.

Don. Edwards wrote:Calculus,
Where on Earth did you get an 8k Venus texture, pun intended, and how good is it. I have been looking for a high-res Venus texture for a few days now. I need one for part of the NASA project I am on. Details please, like where is it at or can you make it available? I am desperate and hate to have to use a low-res 2k texture. Waiting in anticipation.

Don.

I think it comes from NASA, stitched from Magellan RADAR imagery with gaps filled in with a global texture. It is a pretty raw texture (color is not natural:Radar).
I only have a jpg version of 5.7MB.
I think I got it here

ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/textures/pixel/

You can get a 5K map in GIF here:

http://www.solarviews.com/raw/venus/venmap.gif

praesepe wrote:Umm are you referring to me?

I've never created a map for Mercury, in fact, I don't have the source image from de USGS to do so. Maybe you are referring to John Van Vliet's Mercury texture, who mirrored the available data and cloned some more from the Moon map

Sorry my mistake it was John Van Vilet.
He made a very nice 4k Mercury texture with just half of the texture info,
so I thought he mirrored it, but after reading here,
seems he used the moon to fill in.

I think i have an early texture he did where he just used the same half texture and put them back to back

Darkmiss wrote:

praesepe wrote:Umm are you referring to me?

I've never created a map for Mercury, in fact, I don't have the source image from de USGS to do so. Maybe you are referring to John Van Vliet's Mercury texture, who mirrored the available data and cloned some more from the Moon map :?

Sorry my mistake it was John Van Vilet.
He made a very nice 4k Mercury texture with just half of the texture info,
so I thought he mirrored it, but after reading here,
seems he used the moon to fill in.

I think i have an early texture he did where he just used the same half texture and put them back to back

But as Don correctly pointed out above, this leads to craters with shadows into both directions, starting to the left and right of the 'flip axis'...

Not a good solution.

Bye Fridger