Celestia Forums

I have just spent half an houer in downloading a new "earth-clouds.png" file, 10 times larger that the original one!
But no 10 times more impresiv vizual efect?!
I'm not saying about the planet's textures, but about the clouds files in special, they are not real anywhay!

How can I creat *.3ds files? (I whant to know the program and maybe some tutorials!).

xyz wrote:I have just spent half an houer in downloading a new "earth-clouds.png" file, 10 times larger that the original one!
But no 10 times more impresiv vizual efect?!
I'm not saying about the planet's textures, but about the clouds files in special, they are not real anywhay!

How can I creat *.3ds files? (I whant to know the program and maybe some tutorials!). :?:

I had /explicitly warned/ above that my clouds require to be balanced by the adequate texture for the earth surface! Experienced people like Pixel do have appropriate textures already and that is why my clouds look good in that case. My surface textures are coming soon.

My WEB server is still in /alpha/ test operation and not suited for general download yet, since there are no explanations, installation instructions, preview images yet...

The resolution of my clouds is 2048x1024 compared to 1024x512 of the original (medres folder). This increases the length by a factor 2x2=4 to ~2.5MB.
Moreover, the clouds incorporate bumpmapping and colored, semi transparent effects. => 5 MB.
When you use the clouds with a really hires surface texture, then you may look at earth from much closer distance and see many more details. From such a perspective you will see large differences between my clouds and the original ones!

Just have a look at Bruckner's site on my latest image of Central America.
http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia_gallery.html

These are the clouds you just downloaded. Also on the title picture of my new server, you see these clouds.

That's why!

So people whose modem is so slow that it takes them 30 minutes for downloading earth-clouds.png should better not download anything at this time.

About your 3ds question I am not competent.

Bye Fridger

I use an 8k cloud texture, which along with my 8k earth texture is about all my 32MB GF2 card can handle. I might bumpmap my clouds and see if they look any different. NB. My monitor is set to only 25% brightness so the texture probably looks bright and cartoony to everyone else.

Ortolan wrote:I use an 8k cloud texture, which along with my 8k earth texture is about all my 32MB GF2 card can handle. I might bumpmap my clouds and see if they look any different. NB. My monitor is set to only 25% brightness so the texture probably looks bright and cartoony to everyone else.

I think this earth image does look far from optimal for a number of rather obvious reasons.

First of all, it seems that your clouds are uncolored (and unbumped) and have an unnecessary high resolution. 2k is perfectly adequate if the size reduction is done well (cubic interpolation) from an 8k file,say.

Secondly, as I wrote several times already, the cartoon-like BlueMarble earth texture is due to a /massive/ color-oversaturation! The colors are quite OK, but far too "dense".
Thirdly --and this is the hardest part-- a natural impression requires a coordinated overlay of a much less cartoon-like sea color (color saturation reduced almost to minimum!) and a clean skyblue "lower layer" of the clouds.

See, e.g. the 4k title image of my "Celestia Texture Foundry" WEB site involving my 2k bumpmapped, colored clouds.

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~t00fri/texfoundry.html

Bye Fridger

Hi xyz,

xyz wrote:I have just spent half an houer in downloading a new "earth-clouds.png" file, 10 times larger that the original one!
But no 10 times more impresiv vizual efect?!

...because the size only goes into e.g. horizontal resolution with it's square-root. So you still won't be able to see your home, I'm afraid

xyz wrote:I'm not saying about the planet's textures, but about the clouds files in special, they are not real anywhay!

Regarding the quality: First remember you downed on your own risk. Until now there are no thumbnails and even if there are, the textures are provided without any quality statement.

Back to the cloud textures: This seems to be a particular difficult texture, for obvious reasons. We try to mimmick an transparent and translucent, moving and irregualr object with a two-dimensional sphere.

You just have to wait a little bit longer and give Fridger a chance to get settled with his new home.

xyz wrote:How can I creat *.3ds files? (I whant to know the program and maybe some tutorials!).

That has been answered before very recently in the user forum. Try for example Autodesk's preview version. Sure they have tutorials.

Otherwise search the web with Google for 3D or 3DS model tutorials ...

Take care,
Axel

Fridger...South America AND Asia shots are breathtaking...I wonder if chris will ever incorperate specturals on models? I have an idea that would be simply fantastic...Morphing a sphere in MAX with one of your textures...hmmm the possibilities

t00fri wrote:Thirdly --and this is the hardest part-- a natural impression requires a coordinated overlay of a much less cartoon-like sea color (color saturation reduced almost to minimum!) and a clean skyblue "lower layer" of the clouds.

One thing I noticed in my experiments with this is that it creates problems with the ice caps. Since in the real world the Rayleigh-scattered light from the atmosphere combines additively with other light, the blue scatter from the atmosphere doesn't make the brilliant white ice caps (which reflect far more light) look any less white. But in Celestia, the cloud colors are blended with the underlying colors according to the alpha channel, so a blue sky layer makes the ice caps look bluer than overlying clouds.

There are several ways to deal with this-- one is to fade out the blue layer at the poles, another is to cover the poles with a hood of cloud (as is often the case anyway). But it's an issue that has to be dealt with somehow.

You're right about the 8k vs 2k clouds, I wonder why there isn't a visible difference in celestia? I'm not going to add a specular mask until there's a more efficient way of encoding it. Losing half the compression ratio just for a specular spot isn't worth it for me. Just downloaded your Europa texture and it looks fantastic! Time to contact ILM and see if they can send me a high-res Coruscant texture...