Celestia Forums

Over at Space-Graphics.com they have updated there Mars texture to version 3.

And now it come in a whopping 16k texture this time.
Available in shaded relief- Illumination from 45°/45° (North-East)
Or a Flat map for those that like to use ther bump maps.

I tried to make a 16kdds out of it myself, but my system just wont allow it
Oh well 8k only for me.

heres the link http://www.space-graphics.com/redmars_v3.htm

The new textures look incredibly excellent!

The previous version of the "flat" texture had a great loss of details, that's why some people around here merged the V1 with the V2 to try to get a nearly unbumped Mars with some detail.. but this version is oustanding!

I've downloaded the "flat" V3 texture and created a normal map from the large (100Mb) tif elevation/bump texture.. just take a look:








All textures are in 8k dxt format, I'd try a 16k version but I think I don't have the resources to create it.. I only have 512 Mb of ram

Well here are few shots of the shaded 16k texture.


I am uploading the 16k .dds texture as I write this. I will post the links to the files once they are up on the server. You will find a 16k shaded texture that is best viewed when the sun is kept to the right of the screen.
I also made a 8k normalmap with the new info from the sight. Since he made these public releases I feel that its ok to convert them to .dds and it not be a problem for Mario. Its just to bad that he didn't make the non-shaded texture available at 16k. That would have been perfect.

Don.

Niiiiiice shots Don, as usual

But Don, there's already a non-shaded texture available on Space-Graphics

Check this link:

http://www.space-graphics.com/downloads ... lor16K.zip

praesepe wrote:I've downloaded the "flat" V3 texture and created a normal map from the large (100Mb) tif elevation/bump texture.. just take a look:

I did the same, but-
What height did you use for your normalmap? (are you using the Photoshop plugin?) I used 4.5 but that doesnt seem to be enough...

Does anybody else think that this mars is a little too -pink-? It should be a bit browner in my opinion...

praesepe,
I am waiting to here from Mario as I think these 16k textures are all a mistake. I don't think he intentionally released these large textures as most of them are labeled as 8k. I have emailed him to verify as to what’s going on. If he did this on purpose but just misnamed the textures than I will go ahead and make the 16k shadeless .dds as I missed it somehow. I just do not think he was intending to release these 16k textures as these are part of his bread and butter. I really hope he did release this at this size but if he didn't we need to stop passing the urls around until we know for sure. God knows he doesn't need his bandwidth swamped by every Celestia user downloading these things. Last I heard he was having some difficulties so we need to be safe and sane with his server. If he gives the green light I will see if he will allow a mirror on the shatters.net server as long as its ok with Chris of course.

Don.

Wow you guys are fast
Great job on both textures.

Don how much main ram do you have ?
I have 512, rambus with a 1.5gig swap file
and the Nvdxt tool wil not let me create a 16k texture.

I did managed an 8k with ease, but i did play around with the colours first.
As I'm not to keen on the overly high saturation of pink and yellowy look, around the Valles Marineris area.

JackHiggins wrote:Does anybody else think that this mars is a little too -pink-? It should be a bit browner in my opinion...

Yes I am totally with you there Jack, its a great looking texture.
but just too high on the pink, and a bit too yellow in small places too.

for some reasion celestia wont load that textur
When celestia starts everything is normal, but as soon as I try to go to mars celestia locks up, and an error message apears, then celestia closes

Here is my system

Windows xp home
512 megs of ram
1.8 ghs prosesor
and a GForce FX 5900 vidio card

What is going on?

Forgot, it is the 16k textur

One other question Don.
Your previous 2,4, & 8k mars textures seem to be rotated diferently to this texture.

What textures are rotated correctly ?

Darkmiss,
From what I understand the proper alignment is with the Tharsis rise on the left on the texture. Mario tends not to correct for this. All my older Mars textures were aliened like his. I have since changed that and will change that in the 16k version if I get the go-ahead from Mario. All my textures for the Mars project are misaligned unfortunately. There are just to many of them for me to fix for Frank and to time consuming.
As for my system here are my specs:
Athlon 2400XP=2.0GHz
Asus A7N8X Delux Motherboard
1.5Gb of PC 2100 DDR-RAM
2 4096Gb swap-files
GeForce4 TI 4600 with 128Mb DDR-VRAM
1 IBM Deskstar 60Gb 7200RPM Hard Drive
1 Seagate Barracuda 80Gb 7200RPM Hard Drive
2 Western Digital 120Gb 7200RPM Hard Drives
1 Samsung DVD/CDRW Drive
1 Samsung DVD Drive
1 LS120 Floppy Drive
Built-in Nforce2 Dolby Digital Sound system.
1 Apple Pro USB keyboard
1 Logitch Mx700 Wireless USB mouse.
1 Dell/Sony 21" Trinitron nearly flat CRT monitor
and last but not least 1 U.S. Robotics Cable Modem 5 Cooling fans and a very snazzy looking case.
I think that covers all of my system at this time.

Oh and I use pixels bmp2dds utility to make my 16k textures. It takes many more steps but the textures turn out great.

Don.

Ah! No wonder.
You have a whole GIG of ram more than I do.
and Two 4096 swap files!.... wow

Our graphics card are the same, But I only have a 1.5Hz P4.
Although I have a large hard drive I really dont think that making a lager swap file is going to solve my problem.

My system wasn't built with Graphics manipulation in mind.
and when i first came to these forums, I had little clue of it.
Now im converting my own textures. (standard resizing, colouring, and converting)
But what still eludes me, is masking of alpha channels.

Oh! and Don. You left out what desk and chair you use.

JackHiggins wrote:I did the same, but-
What height did you use for your normalmap? (are you using the Photoshop plugin?) I used 4.5 but that doesnt seem to be enough...

I always use the nvdxt DOS tools, the Photoshop plugin sometime hangs and acts weird.. As for the normal map, I use higher values on the scale parameter, usually between 20 and 25, if less, the effect is almost unperceptible

JackHiggins wrote:Does anybody else think that this mars is a little too -pink-? It should be a bit browner in my opinion...

Me too, and some areas seem to be too yellowish.. I am trying to play a bit with the colours and see what happens.. this is what I have now..

Darkmiss wrote:One other question Don.
Your previous 2,4, & 8k mars textures seem to be rotated diferently to this texture.

What textures are rotated correctly ?

If I'm not wrong, all Mars textures at Space-Graphics are off by 180? and need to be displaced in order to use them in Celestia (Grant's corrections)

Hmmm,
I also forgot to add what speakers, handheld, webcam, and printer I use!

I recieved an email from Mario and its not a mistake. So go get those textures. He wasn't aware of the mislabling for the downloads and has fixed them.

I have been playing witht the flat texture but I still can't get real good results with it due to limitations with the bump/normalmaps. So I will stick to useing my own for a while. I may see if I can't do some blending latter.

Don.

These maps are great!!!!

At least i thought they were until i got my first version of a 32k normal map working. It only contains a few of the mola 128 pixel per degree tiles so is very incomplete at the moment but here are a few pics anyway.



This is the space graphics 16k shaded texture.


This is my 32k normal map on the flat space graphics texture. It doesnt actually line up with this texture yet.



As you can see the normal map has turned out incredibly smooth and seems to show even more detail then the space graphics map.

Ps. has anyone tried using the devIL converter i wrote to crunch the 16k textures. It should handle them no problem. + 1 or 2 more pics in my gallery.

Woooow! those views of Valles Marineris are just breathtaking

DBrady wrote:Ps. has anyone tried using the devIL converter i wrote to crunch the 16k textures. It should handle them no problem. + 1 or 2 more pics in my gallery.

Yes, I've tried your tools. For me, it works with 2k, 4k, and 8k files and compresses lots of times faster than the nvdxt tool But when I try with higher resolutions it hangs just at the end of the process It creates a dds file with the appropiate filesize but it is corrupted..

My system specs:
3 Pc, 2 Intel Pentium IV 2.4 GHz
both 512 Mb DDR ram
NVidia GeForce2 64Mb with latest drivers installed
NVidia GeForce4 128 Mb with latest drivers installed
Windows XP Professional in both cases

[quote="praesepe]If I'm not wrong, all Mars textures at Space-Graphics are off by 180? and need to be displaced in order to use them in Celestia (Grant's corrections)[/quote]

Is there something I can change in the solarsys.ssc file that will rotate the planet? Because my system can barely handel using the texture, let alone editing it. Or has someone put it up with the rotation fix already?

billybob884 wrote:
Yes, you can edit the RotationOffset parameter in solarsys.ssc and add 180 degrees pn what you have.. or wait until I upload my texture, wich is properly rotated

I've got three versions of the new Mars texture. I'm trying to decide which one corresponds better to the real Mars colour are.. so here are a few screenshots:

Version 1 (Space-Graphics original colour)


Version 2 (less pink-reddish)


Version 3 (yellowish, as seen in some MGS shots)

Praesepe, I think that your version 2 texture is by far the better one, in colouring.

its simular to the colours i went for.
here is a shot of my 8k shaded relief version.
just a straight map, no bump map, spec map, or anything else.

8k dds dxt1

praesepe wrote:I've got three versions of the new Mars texture. I'm trying to decide which one corresponds better to the real Mars colour are.. so here are a few screenshots

Praesepe, I'm used to look Mars with our Observatory telescope (a 14" Cassegrain), and my opinion is that the image that better matches the telescopic views is the #2 .
It's very nice, thank you for sharing with us .
By

Andrea