Celestia Forums

I guess this is not even possible. If it was, someone had probably done it already. But I can?t let this tought go. I searced for "3d texture" in the Forum-search-engine if someone had been asking about this earlier and got over 1 600 hits. So I don?t know if this exact topic has been up before. I didn?t check all those discussions.

But now, to the topic:
There are lots of nice textures for Celestia but there all has one thing in common. They are flat. When landing on a planet or moon you do not see anything but a completely flat surface (even if the planet looks great from space).

Today I saw this thread: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5521 and I was thinking what a giant leap for textures it would be if we had something similar i Celestia.

Yes, I know, I?m a dreamer. But would it, in some way, some day, be possible to create 3d-textures? Imagine to land on a planet and be surrounded by mountains or valleys. Imagine fly around and see all this instead of a flat surface!

Wouldn?t that be a real Celestia-experience!

Tosv wrote:I guess this is not even possible. If it was, someone had probably done it already. But would it, in some way, some day, be possible to create 3d-textures? Imagine to land on a planet and be surrounded by mountains or valleys. Imagine fly around and see all this instead of a flat surface! Wouldn?t that be a real Celestia-experience!

Hello Tosv, Jestr made a very nice work that you can see here:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31586&highlight=gusev+crater#31586
Then, if you like it, download the file here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/celestia/creators/jestr/Mars%20Surface%20Features%20v1.3.2pre6+.zip

Obviously, the possibility to have ALL the surface of a planet in 3D is actually impossible (tomorrow may be, perhaps a smaller moon), due to the ENORMOUS dimension of the needed files, but it can be done for little portion of the surface, like you can see on Mars for:
Gusev, Ascraeus, Elysium, Arsia, Olympus.
Enjoy!
By

Andrea

Thanks Andrea!

Ah! Jestr?s work is indeed excellent!

I?m aware of the problems. Huge texturefiles and the need of an supercomputer to render them. But the harddrives capacity rises every year and the computers get faster so I hope we, some day, will see 3d-textures at least for earth, the moon and maybe the rest of the inner planets. Jestr har already been given us a taste of it and shown that it?s possible.

So, just keep on dreaming

hmm, what about using a displacement map? But only from low altitudes, and in the same general location you are on the planate so Celestia isnt working overtime.

It would be nice once we are able to have things that go below the spheres' surfaces like Valles Marines instead of only things above it like the models available for Mars now.

Brendan

It definitely CAN be done, as MojoWorld demonstrates, but not in real-time unfortunately, and MojoWorld uses fractals to compute the data rather than starting from some real-world dataset. If the trajectory is known in advance (which it wouldn't be for Celestia), the data can be chopped down to reasonable size by using techniques similar to Virtual Textures, and only storing the data that would be required, however this does not allow free exploration (obviously).

As already mentioned above the technology to allow this is called "displacement mapping". Here's a technical rundown on the technique. http://www.rhythm.com/~ivan/dispMap.html

Unfortunatly, it takes DirectX 9 class hardware to support it easily, and even then I'm unsure of how "easy" it is. I think OpenGL's shader model needs to be improved to support it without lot's of work, though I think things will get easier when OpenGL2 is out. So look forward to that I guess.

In fact it wouldnt be that impossible.
Have you ever heard of displacement Mapping?

If not, don't be worryed, the only grafic card that supports it is the Matrox Phahelia, wich ist slow and extreemly empensive.

With displacement mapping, you could take the bumpmap to create a real Planet surface, in combination of level of detail and virtual textures ist would be possible to create quite stunning looking Planets with the next Generation of Grafic cards.

BUT Ati and Nvidia have no intention to implent the Displacement Mapping in there future Porjects, someday they will probably implent it, cause ist can save much Time in creating Games with realistic surfaces.

Don't Worry, in a couple of years you will be able to take a new look on Celestia....if celestia survives that long. (I hope so)

Displacement Mapping we are comming

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Features/geforce6800/6.html

BrainToast wrote:In fact it wouldnt be that impossible.
Have you ever heard of displacement Mapping?

If not, don't be worryed, the only grafic card that supports it is the Matrox Phahelia, wich ist slow and extreemly empensive.

With displacement mapping, you could take the bumpmap to create a real Planet surface, in combination of level of detail and virtual textures ist would be possible to create quite stunning looking Planets with the next Generation of Grafic cards.

BUT Ati and Nvidia have no intention to implent the Displacement Mapping in there future Porjects, someday they will probably implent it, cause ist can save much Time in creating Games with realistic surfaces.

Don't Worry, in a couple of years you will be able to take a new look on Celestia....if celestia survives that long. (I hope so)

No...the R300+ series(ATI) and anything past NV30(nVidia) can also support hardware displacement mapping...

I am suprised no one has mentioned terrain generation which is the same process and possible on mainstream computers.

http://www.vterrain.org/LOD/Implementations/

The newest addon I am working on will provide a bit of scenery on planets surface due to the fact I use models of the entire planet. They are not as detailed as the programming alternative above but do give you that more detailed approach to planet exploration...

The best bet would be the implementation of the ROAM engine in Celestia using DEM data from USGS and converted to virtual textures, the current process. Or you could simply provide a displacement map as fore-mentioned and render the additional detail using Perlin Noise. Possibly both could be added for real and fictional landscapes...