Celestia Forums

I've recently made a few tiles for a 32k cloud texture. The source is from the ftp site jestr posted in another thread. It is a VT texture which you can only use if cloud speed is zero as Don E. pointed out. I dont have a full set yet as all the tiles have to be made by hand. At the moment i only have four 4k tiles at 32k and four at 16k and a full 8k. So here are some pics.








Think this ones only 16k
There are also one or two more pics in my gallery on the last pages of earth.

WOW!

Well I figured someone was going to give this a try. This is what I wanted to do with the same cloud file but of course we all know how that turned out. My downloads didn't turn out but I am not giving up. The clouds at this kind of detail level and with the inclusion of the hurricane data from the images I have and you can get real good idea of how real we can things to look.
I also see that you are using my shadow textures. Very cool.

Don. Edwards

Very Very Nice! I can't wait until you get the whole set of 32k tiles out the door.

where can you get these very high res cloud and earth textures from?

DBrady...these look fantastic...a must to go with orbital models...I can't (but will) wait!

Regards...bh.

RND,these cloud textures can be found here
ftp://mitch.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/stockli/bluemarble/
along with a bunch of other useful big textures,there is a limit of 10 users at a time I think so if you cant get to it try again another time,cheers Jestr

thanks jestr

Fantastic!!

Can't wait to see the final version!

Just an update on the progress for this texture. I have to restart from scratch as join lines are very prominent after all the bump mapping i'm doing on each individual tile. I think i can get around it by trimming off a row or two of pixels and resizing. I'm also going to decrease the amount of bump mapping as it was quite severe in some places. In the mean time here are some pics of endeavour and the ISS in orbit with the new texture.


Endeavour is orbiting at around 600km.



On the performance side of things - it runs quite slow on my machine ~7fps.
P 2.4
geforce ti4200 64mb
512 ram
Each tile is 4kx4k and dxt5 encoded. The large tile size is because i'm hand making each one.
It runs about 1 or 2fps when running a matching 8k shadow map aswell.

All the textures in the images are my own.
32k recoloured earth
32k nightlights
32k spec map - made from the same source as Buzz's
32k cloud map
32k normal map
and an 8k matching shadowmap for the clouds.

I'll definately see about getting some more web space for this cloud map and possibly a normal map too. My 64k mars map is on hold for the moment as it's very time consumming to make.

Beautiful work DBrady! Do you see any speedup when you do not follow a space craft? I noticed quite some impact on my fps.

Wow, I can hardly wait to see them ready..

Hi DBrady,

How is your cloud project going? It seemed promising.

JovianWeasel wrote:WOW!

You said it.

DBrady, I don't really understand how the textures work, but are you somehow drawing all this yourself? Is that all going into Celestia?

I'll say it this time, WOW!

How do I install these clouds?

Hi Buzz,
I'm sorry to say i havent really had a chance to work on this lately. I'm quite bogged down with projects at the moment - final year, final term of college doesnt give you a whole lot of spare time. It's looking like i probably wont get it done for quite a while, maybe even untill i finish college. Contrarily, if i leave it till then i wont be able to get any webspace to host it (it's on the college server).
If it comes to that i'll try and release what i have already if people would like. Below is the main problem with it at the moment...



These lines are caused in the creation process by bump mapping each tile separately.This is done to give the clouds some better depth and also to make them more opaque etc.. I was going to fix it by just trimming off some pixels on each tile and resizing but then the time issue rears its ugly head. To me they are intensely annoying but if people thought they could put up with it i might just and release it anyway.(of course this all depends on if college is willing to give me any more space) So let me know what ye's think.

I can understand you want to prioritize your studies! The clouds already look nice though, it would be a pity to abandon them. So maybe I could try to help by doing some trimming if you can make them available somehow...

DBrady: I'm working on a similar project for Orbiter (only 16k though)

Yours, needless to say, put my little project to shame.

I suggest you color, bumpmap, and adjust shadow color in GIMP/Photoshop with 8192x8192 tiles, then chop up for the VTs - this
should reduce scaling artifacts and speed the process (only 8 tiles to do).

Also, is the icecover on Antarctica, Greenland, and sea-ice aliased as
cloud cover in the 43k MODIS images? I had a bitch of a time eliminating
this and cloning from the Arctic (which seemed more or less free of these
errors) in a seamless fashion for my 8k Orbiter clouds.

Daryl,
Unfortunately i do not have enough system memory(512) to work with 8x8k images in gimp for assembling the cloud textures. If memory serves me you have double that?
As for aliasing at the poles etc, the modis images don't have any data at the poles.
They have some similarities to the space-graphics texture(which i assume you're using) but mario seems to have added in alot of his own. Consequently a 32k texture could never be made based on mario's clouds as the 32k level would be very different to the rest.
My approach was to use the 8k blue marble for levels up to 8k and the modis data(which matches perfectly the BM clouds) for levels 16 and 32k.
If i could manage to make the tiles small enough the poles on the the higher levels could be left out, showing the lower resolution underneath. Since the clouds around the poles are not very interesting anyway, this seems like the best approach.
At the moment all my vt tiles are 4x4k which runs very slow and precludes the aforementioned pole tile exclusion as there would be no tiles left at the 16k level doing this.
Will you be releasing your 16k clouds for celestia? If you do i may not bother with mine. Your moon texture looks excellent as does io. I'm sure your clouds would be of a similiar standard.
Besides i've never found the leap from 16k to 32k to be all that much better-especially considering the increase in file size.


The eastern hemisphere from modis

Buzz,
Unfortunately the tiles are in dxt5 format(i deleated the png's when i decided to start over-because of too much bumpmapping etc). uncompressing them,trimming, rescaling and recompressing would probably just mangle them.

DBrady,

Just out of interest, what version of celestia are you using these VT cloudmaps on? I can't get VT's to work as a cloudmap at all, using 1.3.1final or 1.3.1pre1...?