Celestia Forums

Does anyone have (or know where to get) a 2k or better topological map of Venus? I need it to design a blue (earth-like) Venus texture, and want to make it as detailed as possible. Will of course share the result with anyone interested.

-rthorvald

PS:
... Ok, i should have looked better; i found Maxim?s 2k map. But i am looking for even higher resolution...

The TopoVenus data was the best that I could find on the net. I came in tiles from a database. The original resolution was 2.8k

If you are able to find a database with higher resolution venus data, I would go and assemble a texture. But I'm afraid that there is no better data available from the last spacecraft mission sent there.

maxim

Ok, i used the 2k map, and have made an earth-like (atmosphere and oceans) Venus texture from it. I interpolated it to 4k, and used coloring and some details off Earth bluemarble images for realism.

If anyone is interested, i put it up here - both the textures, and an imaginary planetary system based on it: http://runar.thorvaldsen.net/celestiastuff.html . Feel free to comment or offer suggestions for enhancement.

-rthorvald

If anyone needs it for a Venus project of some sort, i have vectorized a Venus topomap. It shows (only) contours of highlands/continents, and is built at 8k, retouched with some guessing, and reasonably detailed. Anyone interested can download it from my web page.

rthorvald,

thanks for the work. I'll gonna take a look these days.

maxim

If you need help with realistic figures for orbits keep checking this link

http://www.celestialvisions.net/ssc.html

I am in the process of updating this calculator whenever I get the chance...Soon it will create an entire system randomly with moons etc all within the standards set by kepler and roche...

Rassilon wrote:If you need help with realistic figures for orbits keep checking this link

http://www.celestialvisions.net/ssc.html

Nice! I?ll do that. Thank you.

-rthorvald

I am working on a terraformed Venus texture, and would like some feedback on what i am doing.

The Venus project is my first world-building attempt, and is most of all my way of learning texture design, so any comments are most welcome.

Here?s a preview:


Larger resolution, and a screendump from Celestia is here:
http://runar.thorvaldsen.net/celestia/temp/bvenus.html

-rthorvald

Beautiful. Much better than my first attempt at a Earth-like world, certainly.

The only problem I have with it is how you've painted the terrain onto your continents. A number of areas just don't seem to fit in with the coastlines. They look like they've been cut off prematurely, like the entire planet was terraformed, and then the water was dumped on top as an afterthought.

diabloblanco17 wrote:A number of areas just don't seem to fit in with the coastlines. They look like they've been cut off prematurely

Could you be a little more spesific - what/where to look? I try to make it look realistic, but am no geologist...

I have added a map with names on major land masses on the web page, to make it easier to point at things.

-rthorvald

rthorvald,
I think what diabloblanco17 is trying to say that you have a few places that mountains just suddenly get cut of by the ocean. If you look at the Earth, the only reference we have for an Earth like planet, mountains just don't drop off into the sea. They gradually lower in elevation to the sea. Any mountain range that you place should have a smoother transition to the coast lines. You might consider cloning in some flatter ground to help make the transition more smoothly.
All in all the texture is coming along nicely.
Now what diabloblanco17 didn't tell you is that he has a very nice tutorial on his site to teach any perspective texture artist the ins and outs of how to go about making an Earth like texture. You can find his tutorial here http://s92198053.onlinehome.us/html/pla ... ooine.html
I was going to go through and make a tutorial like this but since he has done such a nice one I will make my tutorial on making another kind of texture.
Keep up the good work.

Don. Edwards

Thorvald - Have you seen my Cytherea (Blue Venus) map?

While the colours don't look anywhere near as nice as yours, our maps look rather different. Does your map have a really high sea level? (I can barely see anything that tallies with my topography on yours - where's Artemis Chasma??). I got the topography from the Magellan topo data, but it's kinda low resolution (that's the best we've got though).

Waitaminute... your map is upsidedown! Ishtar Terra should be at the north (top) of the map, on your map it's at the bottom!

I also figured that a terraformed Venus wouldn't have icecaps.

Don. Edwards wrote:Any mountain range that you place should have a smoother transition to the coast lines. You might consider cloning in some flatter ground

Yes, i see that... Easy to go blind on the details; i?ll have to re-work some areas. Thanks, both of you.

-rthorvald

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Waitaminute... your map is upsidedown! Ishtar Terra should be at the north (top) of the map, on your map it's at the bottom!

Celestia uses rotational rather than ecliptic north, so Ishtar Terra should be at the bottom of the map if it's for use in Celestia.

Grant

Completely forgot I had that on there. Oh well. Don Edwards covered pretty much all of it. Some areas of your terrain have a...er - contour, shall we say? - that runs perpendicular to the coastline. Most terrain on the Earth has a contour that runs parallel to nearby coastlines. The desert on the right side of your largest continent is a good example of this. Parts of the desert appear to suddenly be cut off by the ocean. Instead, try to have them curve somewhat along with the coastline.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:our maps look rather different. Does your map have a really high sea level? (I can barely see anything that tallies with my topography on yours - where's Artemis Chasma??).

Well, it?s in the upper left. It is not as pronounced as in the topomap, but it is there: two rocky-mountains-like areas that don?t quite meet in the middle - though i am re-working that part now (see the above post).

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:I got the topography from the Magellan topo data.

My map is based on a trace i made off the topo map Maxim posted on this forum in january. The sea level i got is simply the threshold level at which i traced it - and it is high, i did that to keep the noise to a minimum, as i felt it looked more realistic without a zillion tiny islands saturating the oceans.

Coastlines became way too rough compared with images of the Earth, so i assumed that the presence of oceans would do that, and smoothed them out a bit.

But you are correct in that i have cheated on the interiors; i think you worked directly on a real image, whereas mine is a jigzaw puzzle of Earth bluemarble images - i was more interested in resolution than in being strictly accurate. As for the ice caps, i started out without them, with everything desert-like exept for the poles, which were green. But it did?nt look right to me, and i added somewhat less ice than the Earth has - though i know this might be a bit over-the-top-terraforming

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Waitaminute... your map is upsidedown! Ishtar Terra should be at the north (top) of the map, on your map it's at the bottom!.

Yes, its?rotated 180 degrees - i thought it should be, to come out correct in Celestia?

-rthorvald

rthorvald,
Venus is upside-down to the rest of the planets. No amount of terraforming will ever tip the planet back over on its axis. So you can see it is most important that you keep Venus upside-down and rotating backwards.

Don. Edwards

rthorvald wrote:My map is based on a trace i made off the topo map Maxim posted on this forum in january. The sea level i got is simply the threshold level at which i traced it - and it is high, i did that to keep the noise to a minimum, as i felt it looked more realistic without a zillion tiny islands saturating the oceans.

Well, you can compare it to the magellan topography map I made at:
http://members.shaw.ca/evildrganymede/a ... s-topo.gif

The only manipulation I did with that was to clone some detail into the originally black data gaps.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Waitaminute... your map is upsidedown! Ishtar Terra should be at the north (top) of the map, on your map it's at the bottom!.

Yes, its?rotated 180 degrees - i thought it should be, to come out correct in Celestia?

Apparently so... but when you render it in Celestia , Ishtar Terra should be in the same geographic hemisphere as Greenland is on Earth, shouldn't it? Yes, it rotates "upsidedown" and retrograde, but Ishtar is still in the northern geographic hemisphere, isn't it? (ie. you'd see the north celestial pole (i.e. Polaris) from Ishtar if you could see through the atmosphere, not the south celestial pole).

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Ishtar Terra should be in the same geographic hemisphere as Greenland is on Earth, shouldn't it? Yes, it rotates "upsidedown" and retrograde, but Ishtar is still in the northern geographic hemisphere, isn't it? (ie. you'd see the north celestial pole (i.e. Polaris) from Ishtar if you could see through the atmosphere, not the south celestial pole).

Ahem:

granthutchison wrote:Celestia uses rotational rather than ecliptic north, so Ishtar Terra should be at the bottom of the map if it's for use in Celestia.

Honest. If you don't believe me, compare the appearance of Venus's surface in Celestia (Ishtar in full view of Polaris) with the position of Ishtar on the default Celestia surface texture (at the bottom of the map).

Grant

It's not that I didn't believe you, grant. It's that I thought for a minute there that I'd been visualising Venus' geography wrong for the past 13 years!