Earth land cover 32K virtual texture needs a host

[timcrews]

In the "32K Spec Map Case" thread, Buzz has pointed out a fantastic source of Earth Textures,

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/LCC/

This web site has a 1-km resolution map of the entire Earth, color-coded to reflect the land cover conditions in that square-kilometer. For example, various different types of forestation, or desert, or wetlands, or savanna, each have their own color. A key to the color coding is found on the above-cited web site.

I have created a 32K virtual texture based on this data. It uses 1024-pixel tiles in the PNG format. The entire texture is about 222M in size.

I believe that these images may be publically re-distributed, given that they come from NASA. If I am wrong about that, someone please let me know so I don't get myself in trouble.

I do not have any web space. If anyone wants to host this texture, I would be glad to upload it per your instructions.

It works very well as an overlay texture. It is also sort of interesting to use it as a primary surface texture with a high-res bump/normal map.

I had to make a difficult decision when re-sizing the texture. At its original 1-km resolution, the image was 43,200 pixels wide by 21,600 pixels tall. Each pixel represented the land cover of a square kilometer, in about ten discrete colors. When re-sizing (down-sizing), I had to decide how to handle these ten discrete colors. Did I want to ensure that every pixel still had one of the original ten colors? If so, when four pixels are down-scaled to one pixel, how do you decide which of the original four pixels' colors to use for the down-scaled single pixel? This seemed to be a problem without a good solution, so I finally decided to allow the resize program to blend colors, so that each new pixel is a blend of the colors of the original pixels. The downside of this is, as you zoom way in to the highest-resolution available, and then a little further, you will see plenty of pixels whose colors do not match any of those in the key.

Tim Crews

[DJ_Night]

Greetings Tim Crews.. my webhost server has a very limited bandwidth 500mb/month..

Seldens FTP server or Don E. FTP would be great, both are fast and stable,
hopefully someone will help you out on this..


can you please show us some screenshots?

[timcrews]

The NASA URL given in the original post has several downloadable animations of the map projected onto a shaded globe. These look very similar to the results produced by using my texture as the primary Earth texture in Celestia.

Tim

[timcrews]

I also just made a .DDS virtual texture. It is quite a bit larger unzipped (455 MB), but it does load faster, if you have the hardware to support it.

To my surprise, the DDS texture zips down to 79MB. The PNG texture does not compress at all from its uncompressed 222 MB.

Tim Crews

[MRIS]

timcrews:

Would something like an ATI 128Mb Radeon 9700 be able to display something like that DDS file you mentioned?

Any luck finding a website?
If not, have you considered running eMule 0.41b on the Kademelia network and sharing just that one file, then posting the ED2K link to this forum?

If it proves as popular as "Logix^nuance" 16ktextures addon pack (197Mb RAR file) then people won't have any trouble getting it, once someone's got it it will tend to spread in the network then remain available indefinitely.

[jestr]

You should now be able to download my 32kEarthSpecular virtual texture
using Emule,though I'm not sure it will be any faster than my FTP site as I am limited to 11k/s upload speed currently shared between Emule and FTP program.I guess it could be faster if a lot of people are logged in to FTP program.Also if a number of others have this file on Emule then it would be faster.You should also be able to find
64kEarthJPG
32kEarthNormal
and some of my other addons this way
Best of luck Jestr