Steve Albers' Europa texture - revised

[jim]

Hi all,

I've played a bit with Steve Albers' Europa texture. Here are some screen shots (2k surface and 2k normal map).







Jens

[Cham]

Nice !

Can we download it ?

[DBrady]

Hi jim,

Nice textures, especially the normal map. If you're making a dds texture from it you should give ati's new tool a try if you havent already.

http://www.ati.com/developer/tools.html

Its called 'The Compressionator'.
I only found it a few days ago. It is quite slow but has a wealth of features including channel weighting and an image error preview - very nice for testing the different compression formats.
There is also an interesting article on normal map compression...

http://www.ati.com/developer/NormalMapCompression.pdf

While not really applicable to celestia at the moment it is an interesting read - i know how you are interested in these things : )

[maxim]

Did you deploy it yet? It's not on your website.

maxim

[Cham]

Jim,

please, make your new texture in dds format. It will be better for many of us.

I can't wait to install your Europa

[jim]

Cham and Maxim, I will upload my texture at this weekend if I found a bit time to prepare the zip's. Shall I include my normal map? At the moment my textures are dds dxt3 for surface and dds u888 for the normal map (best dds-quality on nvidea grafic).

DBrady, thanks for the tip. I've tested this tool already a year ago. Now I will look if something has been changed.

Jens

[maxim]

I would prefer png as normal map, but it's up to you.

maxim

[jim]

Hi all,

I would prefer png as normal map, but it's up to you.

Now I've used high quality JPG for the normal map. The file has the half size of the best PNG and artifacts are not visible.

The Europa map pack is now available on my site. Many thanks goes further to Celestia Motherload for hosting this.

Have fun,
Jens

[Cham]

Hi all,

I would prefer png as normal map, but it's up to you.

Now I've used high quality JPG for the normal map. The file has the half size of the best PNG and artifacts are not visible.

The Europa map pack is now available on my site. Many thanks goes further to Celestia Motherload for hosting this.

Have fun,
Jens

Where ? I can't find it on your web site, according to the www button below.

[Guest]

Where ? I can't find it on your web site, according to the www button below.

Have you looked below Jupiter?

Jens

[Cham]

Ok, it's fine now. My web browser just needed to update its cache.

Thanks.

[Steve Albers]

Greetings Celestia Community,

Thought I'd pass along that I've been making continuing updates to my Europa map. The most recent one available (at this time the 8/24 version) can be found on my website at
'http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html. Feel free to compare it to the older versions.
I also have some global images of Io, Venus and Jupiter.

Steve Albers

steve.albers@noaa.gov

[selden]

Steve,

They look great!

Unfortunately, they aren't compatible with Celestia, each in a different way

Celestia needs them to be a power of 2 on a side, and have 0 degrees of longitude in the center.

And Celestia uses the opposite convention for North for Venus surface maps.

sigh

[t00fri]

Steve,

They look great!

Unfortunately, they aren't compatible with Celestia, each in a different way

Celestia needs them to be a power of 2 on a side, and have 0 degrees of longitude in the center.

And Celestia uses the opposite convention for North for Venus surface maps.

sigh

I think Steve Albers' new 4k maps of io and europa are the best we have to date! The required transformation of the central meridian to the Celestia definition is of course entirely trivial. I appreciate in particular the careful matching of lores and hires patches in the europa texture, as well as the various color enhancements in both textures.

I think we should include 1k versions thereof into the distribution (if Steve allows us to do so...)

Bye Fridger

[Guest]

Hi again,

I have been in touch with Grant Hutchison over the past month or two and I believe he has incorporated my Io and Europa maps in the latest Celestia release. The Europa one he has may not be the very latest as I've been periodically making updates throughout August. I may continue to fine tune some of the hi-res patches.

I usually use the 'Gimp" in Linux to reset the central meridian for Celestia when I manually add in the images.

So far I've just used my Io and Europa images in Celestia. The Venus one might be interesting though I agree it would have to be resized, etc. For that one the color of course isn't realistic. I would suggest though something like the use of Tayfun Oner's shaded topography map combined with the radar brightness info. In fact perhaps that's something I could experiment with at some point. It could be interesting to be able to fly
over the surface of Venus just under the cloud decks with a high resolution texture.

The Jupiter image I've worked with is mainly for display as a movie. Perhaps this can be shown as a movie in Celestia with some enhancements? Of course the times would only be valid during the ten days of the movie. It does look pretty neat though.


Steve Albers

[selden]

Steve,

Although Celestia does not (yet?) directly support animated surface textures, it should be possible to create the equivalent of a movie by using Beginning and Ending directives for many objects. A separate object would be defined for each frame of the movie.

So far as I know, nobody has actually tried to do this yet, though.

[granthutchison]

I have been in touch with Grant Hutchison over the past month or two and I believe he has incorporated my Io and Europa maps in the latest Celestia release. The Europa one he has may not be the very latest as I've been periodically making updates throughout August.

Hi Steve:
Yes, I've been holding off on further updating the 1k versions of your textures in Celestia until your current creative storm settles a little ...
The last update I did was to Io when you made a significant colour change to some parts of the texture.

Grant