32k BlueMarble Virtual Earth Texture is now available

[Mario]

The 32k BlueMarble Earth Texture created by Walton Comer is now available for download at http://www.marfig.com/celestia/.

There are two versions. A DDS one weighting 90Mb, and a JPG one with 126Mb. Installation instruction are inside the zip file.

For those of you who don't know, this is a virtual texture which means you'll have to get Celestia 1.3.1 beta version in order to see it in all its glory. You can get this beta version at http://63.224.48.65/celestia/files/. Current realease is "pre9". In the mean time help the developers by beta testing this release.

Thank you Walton for such a beautiful texture

Mario

[enfield]

Thank you

[Darkmiss]

Thank you Mario
Great work

[Guest]

Well I guess this one will probably convince me to install 1.3.0 pre 9! Oh well.

Mario, can you put a screen shot of a shallow water/coastal area? Anyone else who's given this one a try?

I will have to download this one on a friends broadband connection.

Regards...bh...not logged in again.

[Mario]

Mario, can you put a screen shot of a shallow water/coastal area?

Will do. give 10 minutes

Mario

[Mario]

Ok. It's there. You can now also click on the images to see their real-size counterparts and added a small description of the snapshot to the alt attribute of the image.

3 notes only:

- My graphics card is really not the best to be taking snapshots without prejudice to the quality of the etxture. It's a NVidia GeForce 2 MX. I'm sure most of you will have much better results with this texture. I apologize for what may be perceived as poor quality snapshots by some of you.

- However, what you see is from the DDS version of the texture, and all of you out there with graphics cards similar to mine will be pleased to know that this texture is not out of your reach.

- As far as I'm aware Walton didn't intend for this to be a final version of his work. If you like it already, just wait and see...

Mario

[JackHiggins]

Is there any 32k Earth virtual texture set yet...?

I'd like to be able to download only the parts I want in super Hi-res... Remember 70% of the earth is ocean, any I don't really want to see that in 32k... I have a dialup too, so if I could build up my collection of ctx tiles bit by bit it'd be better than waiting 6 hours for 1 90MB file...

[Guest]

Jack...I think this is a 32k virtual texture set.

Regards...bh...still not logged in.

[chris]

Mario,

Thanks for making this available through your site. There's no way shatters.net could handle the traffic . . .

--Chris

[selden]

bh,

But it's all in one gigantic lump

Mario,

A lot of people, not just Jack, would like to be able to download the highres pictures for just a small area of the surface. It'd be greatly appreciated if you could persuade Walton to make the high-resolution directories available separately, but for smaller geographic areas. Figuring out which tiles should go together will be a problem, of course. The partial downloads probably would have to include some of the same tiles around their edges.

[Mario]

Is there any 32k Earth virtual texture set yet...?

I'd like to be able to download only the parts I want in super Hi-res... Remember 70% of the earth is ocean, any I don't really want to see that in 32k... I have a dialup too, so if I could build up my collection of ctx tiles bit by bit it'd be better than waiting 6 hours for 1 90MB file...

I'm afraid I only have 500Mb available on that server. The total uncompressed size of the pack is 341MB. However, I guess I could take out the JPG version. That would leave me enough room to make it available both the zip file for those on broadband and the individual sets for those on dial-up.

However, someone will have to help me doing this. I would need to know what to make available and how to describe it on the webpage.

Mario

[ElPelado]

It looks very very good!!! i have a geforce2 with 64 MB and it looks really good!!

i havea question now: the small parts are from a 32k texture right? so I am not realy using a 32k texture, but a much smaller one taken from it?
bye

[Mario]

bh,

But it's all in one gigantic lump

Mario,

A lot of people, not just Jack, would like to be able to download the highres pictures for just a small area of the surface. It'd be greatly appreciated if you could persuade Walton to make the high-resolution directories available separately, but for smaller geographic areas. Figuring out which tiles should go together will be a problem, of course. The partial downloads probably would have to include some of the same tiles around their edges.

I'll see what I can do about this.
I don't see any problem on my side. I just wished I knew more about the whole concept of creating virtual textures. I'm sure Walton wouldn't mind then me doing the dirty work for him and separate those 90Mb in more manageable sets. I'll contact him about this. I'm sure he will do it and I'll post it as soon as possible.

Mario

[Mario]

Mario,

Thanks for making this available through your site. There's no way shatters.net could handle the traffic . . .

--Chris

It's a pleasure to help in any way, Chris.

Mario

[abiogenesis]

I made a 32k virtual texture from the BlueMarble images, myself, a while back. What I'd really like is a 32k version with the arctic ice in place. The BlueMarble texture looks kind of artificial. Does anyone know of a more realistic high-res earth texture?

Out of curiosity, do you know which compression level was used to make the .dds tiles? I used dxt1c because it introduced the fewest artifacts, but my installation size is nearly 2.5 GBs!

And about the superfluous high-detail textures: With 5 levels of 1k tiles, I counted and removed all tiles that contained only 1 color (ocean blue). There were 7 in level 3 and 115 in level 4. That's almost 20% (122/682) of all the tiles! I'm sure there are a lot more that just have a single, tiny, speck of an island, but it's harder to check for them.

P.S. - Chris, when making the VTs, I use NetPBM's pamdice to build the tiles. Unfortunately, that produces files like so: tx_YY_XX. Not only do I have to swap the columns, but I also have to remove any leading 0s (ala tx_X_Y). Is there any way that an optional field could be added to the VirtualTexture descriptor that allows the user to specify the format of the filenames? Something like

Code: Select all

NameFormat "YY,XX"

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

[bh]

Mario...no links to the screen shots. I'm really keen to have a look at these as I've only got a G2 card myself.

Regards...bh.

[Mario]

Hit the refresh button. They are there.

Mario

[Mario]

Ok. Walton asked me to relay the following to you since he's currently at work. It's about separating the zip file into more mangeable pieces:

I'll take a look at it, however, I would be very surprised if it made much
difference to the final size fo the zip file. All the ocean files will have
compressed very well so they cannot possibly be contributing much at all to
the total file size. Ergo, leaving jus the landmass tiles will probably
weigh in at a similar total size. To put a little data behind that
statement. The first 50% of all tiles contribute only 1.3MB to the DDS zip
file. I suspect that the result will be similar for the JPG files.
Unfortunately people on dialup may have to leave the computer on over night
to get it downloaded.

Can you relay this info to the forums... I'm at work at the moment.

Walton

[billybob884]

Great job!!!! Purely incredible, many, many thanks to the author!

[DBrady]

Mario,
I think what people mean is to have each tile for download individually.
I have a picture to help people decide which tiles to download if you do decide to do this.



If, for instance, you wanted the tile with Ireland in it : ) you would need the tile tx_7_1 - since the naming convention for tiles is tx_X_Y.

Using 2k x 2k size tiles the set of 32k resolution tiles would go in a level3 folder
level2 would be a 16k set of tiles
level1 8k
& level0 4k - containing two 2k x 2k tiles.(with a base split of 0 of course)


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