Celestia Forums

Hey Everyone,

I have just finished the preliminary BlueMarble October texture. I have removed the dark outlines of the continental shelves and blended my ocean layer from previous Earth textures by 50%. This lightens the water in some of the sallow regions and lakes and adds just a hint of the marbling pattern in the oceans in various areas and around the Polar Regions. I have also added the missing Northern Polar ice back into the texture. What follows are some screen-caps of the texture in action. Please take into consideration that my Earth.ssc settings probably differ from yours so this texture may look vary different on your system. So here are the pictures.































Now I do have the texture uploaded and it is ready for testing. I consider this a beta texture, so there still may be some room for improvement. So if any of you want to test it, it can be downloaded from the link below. I must warn everyone that this is strictly a 16k texture at this point. So those of you with the video cards that can handle the texture are welcome to download it and give me your impressions and comments. I do intend to make lower resolution versions for the more challenged video card owners. But again this is just a preliminary beta so I don?€™t have those ready as of yet. I have also made available my 16k Earth normalmap. This has been missing in action for quite a while. I will be making a new one based on the new BlueMarble data. So this will be just a hold over till then.
I think that covers everything at this point, here are the links and let me know what your thoughts are on the texture. Oh yes and one more thing, I have chosen to use the RAR compression format for all future works. It simply gives me smaller files to upload. I seem to have solved my upload problems with a change in FTP software. Or so I hope.

BlueMarble ?€?October?€

Beautiful as always Don! But I will leave the testing to others because of my graphics card's abilities...

Hello Don, it's very very beautiful, as always your creations are.
I have only one little problem, but don't know if it's only mine or not: it seems me a bit darker than usual, am I wrong?
If yes, may this be due to the different .ssc file you use?
If yes, could you kindly show it here?
Beg your pardon for my many requests, but as you know I love your textures, so I wish to see them at their best.
Very well done, anyhow.
Next one will be June?
BTW, can you tell me what is the cloudmap you used in the above images?
Is it
Realistic_Earth_clouds4kdds.zip or
New-Northern-Summer-Clouds_4kDDS.zip ?
Bye and thank you

Andrea

Very nice work Don. I installed both files (although I am not sure I have the normals working correctly) along with your night, spec and summer clouds/shadows and ran smoothly on my work system and home system.

WORK: recieved 15-30 fps, lower far away, nice in orbit.
Pentium4 2.8, 512Mb RAM, Intel MB, GeForce FX 5200, XP Pro SP2+

HOME: anywhere from 30-100+ fps
Athlon XP+ 3000, 1Gb DDR RAM, Asus A7N8X Deluxe, ATI 9600XT, XP Pro SP2+

ANDREA I believe the cloudmap is his Northern Summer as it is the one I used as well...

ANDREA,
You are correct about the how the texture is darker. All the new BlueMarble textuers are fairly dark. My oceans layer only ever so slightly lightens the oceans. So for many useres it will look very dark. One thing to do is make sure that you are using the OpenGL vertex program/nVidia combiners setting by toggling control v till that is your setting this should brighten things up some. Also if you are using an FX series card try the nVidia GeForce FX settings. If this doesn't help I am more than willing to share my SSC settings. But be aware my setting are designed to work with my cloud textures. I have experimented quite a bit to get the look and feel you see in these pictures.

Don.

Hello buggs_moran, you are right, it's the New-Northern-Summer-Clouds texture, very nice. I'm installing it, thank you.

Hello Don, I have not used the OpenGL vertex program/nVidia combiners because IMHO it (apparently?) reduces the sharpness of the image, but you are right, it becomes almost clear as the previous textures.
My card is an older one, GeForce 4600 Ti 128 MB, but on next January I'll have the 6800 GT 256 MB, and then things will change.
Thank you to both of you for the information, and to Don for his wonderful work.
Bye

Andrea

I know it's redundant but, you're one heck of an artist Don! I think I have just about every texture you ever made (for Celestia). I'm a big fan of your work!

Hey Tech Sgt. Chen,
Thanx for the complements. I do try my best and will continue doing what I can.

As some of you might have noticed in using my textures, that the coloring at lower elevations doesn't quite match pictures I posted. Some of you using my cloudmap textures may have also noticed that things seem just a bit hazy.
Andrea asked about my settings in the solarsys.ssc for Earth and I guess it is time for me to fess up to a few things. Not that I have been keeping this a secret, but more of an ongoing oversight on my part. I want everyone to be able to see these new textures as I feel they should be seen and as they look on my system. So let me first explain why some of you may have noticed that that using my clouds causes an ever so slight white haze, its simply there because I put it there. After almost three years of making and playing with cloud textures I have come up with a workable solution to a few short comings in Celestia and adding this haze has worked out beautify for the most part. The reason I added the haze layer to the clouds is a simple one. It is because I changed the default haze color for the Earth to a bluer and slightly denser one that gives a little more realistic look. Because I have changed the haze color, the normal haze setting is now taken up by the clouds and it works out very well. The haze in the clouds is very subtle. But it is there and when combined with the blue haze color you get some very beautiful lower altitude blue light scattering. This is another reason why my ocean layer added to the BlueMarble texture has a bluer look at the edges of the Earth and looks almost black directly overhead. It has taken me allot of tweaking to get things to look this way. I must apologize for not sharing this information sooner than I am. But I am going to share it now. Now please keep in mind that these settings will only work well with my cloudmaps as they have the haze layer. If anyone wants a copy of this diffuse haze layer for there own cloudmap creation just ask and I will send it to you. So here are my magic settings for the Earth. Give them a try with the new October texture or even my older textures with my cloudmaps and see what you think.

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "October.dds"
NightTexture "land_ocean_ice_lights_aurora_8k.dds"

SpecularTexture "Earth16kSpec.dds"
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.51 ]
SpecularPower 25.0
HazeColor [ 0.50 0.7 2.0 ]
HazeDensity 0.35
Radius 6378.140 # equatorial
# Oblateness 0.0034

NormalMap "Earth-NorMap-16k.dds"
# BumpMap "earthbump.*"
# BumpHeight 4.5

Atmosphere {
Height 75
Lower [ 0.43 0.52 0.65 ]
Upper [ 0.26 0.47 0.84 ]
Sky [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
Sunset [ 1.0 0.6 0.2 ]
# Sunset [ 0.3 1.0 0.5 ]
CloudHeight 10
CloudSpeed 00
CloudMap "New-Northern-Summer-Clouds_8kDDS.dds"
}

CustomOrbit "vsop87-earth"
EllipticalOrbit {
Period 1.0000
SemiMajorAxis 1.0000
Eccentricity 0.0167
Inclination 0.0001
AscendingNode 348.739
LongOfPericenter 102.947
MeanLongitude 100.464
}

RotationPeriod 23.9344694 # 23.93419
Obliquity -23.45
RotationOffset 280.5 # offset at default epoch J2000

Albedo 0.30
}

Of course most of you will not be using all the same textures I am using so I wouldn?€™t recommend replacing your Earth entries with mine but simply jot down the settings for haze color and density and make the changes to your solarsys.ssc. Then give them a try.

Now on to a few other things. I have been pondering a little over the new seasonal textures of Earth. What I have come up with is that after finishing the season textures I am going to kind of replicate what was done with the original BlueMarble texture a few years ago. What I mean is that the original texture was originally supposed to show Earth with a maximum amount of vegetation. But the simple fact is that although they attempted that, the texture never really properly displayed this information. I found in many areas that the seasonal vegetation that was to be at its maximum showed a great deal of dead vegetation. Now with these new textures I will be able to combine the maximum vegetation data together for an all encompassing single Earth texture for those that don?€™t want to deal with all 12 seasons. This texture would then be used to replace my Realistic Earth texture and as a base for a new Pale Blue Dot texture to replace the present one. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that BlueMarble didn?€™t release a new cloudmap to go along with the new textures. As I have stated in the past I have seen renders Earth using new cloudmap data, so am sure there are a least a few new cloudmaps. I can however try and integrate new data into the old cloudmap to make some new ones. I am at least going to make a spring and autumn cloudmap for use with the textures.
Ok I am starting to ramble on here. I will keep everyone updated as best I can.

Don. Edwards

Very nice,DON.Your work is really very good.Even the 16k new version of BM is more detailed than the previous one.Can??t wait to the 32k new BM!
But in your Earth Central,your The New-Northern-Summer-Clouds_4kDDS.dds" is not available to download,because I can??t click it.And there is no Cloud Shadows texture available.I know that there is one in Celestia Motherlode,but it is said that you have to go to homepage to see the configuration and instalation procedures,but it isn??t there.Can you help me?

Don. Edwards wrote:Hey Tech Sgt. Chen,
Thanx for the complements. I do try my best and will continue doing what I can.

As some of you might have noticed in using my textures, that the coloring at lower elevations doesn't quite match pictures I posted. Some of you using my cloudmap textures may have also noticed that things seem just a bit hazy.
Andrea asked about my settings in the solarsys.ssc for Earth and I guess it is time for me to fess up to a few things. Not that I have been keeping this a secret, but more of an ongoing oversight on my part. I want everyone to be able to see these new textures as I feel they should be seen and as they look on my system. So let me first explain why some of you may have noticed that that using my clouds causes an ever so slight white haze, its simply there because I put it there. After almost three years of making and playing with cloud textures I have come up with a workable solution to a few short comings in Celestia and adding this haze has worked out beautify for the most part. The reason I added the haze layer to the clouds is a simple one. It is because I changed the default haze color for the Earth to a bluer and slightly denser one that gives a little more realistic look. Because I have changed the haze color, the normal haze setting is now taken up by the clouds and it works out very well. The haze in the clouds is very subtle. But it is there and when combined with the blue haze color you get some very beautiful lower altitude blue light scattering. This is another reason why my ocean layer added to the BlueMarble texture has a bluer look at the edges of the Earth and looks almost black directly overhead. It has taken me allot of tweaking to get things to look this way. I must apologize for not sharing this information sooner than I am. But I am going to share it now. Now please keep in mind that these settings will only work well with my cloudmaps as they have the haze layer. If anyone wants a copy of this diffuse haze layer for there own cloudmap creation just ask and I will send it to you. So here are my magic settings for the Earth. Give them a try with the new October texture or even my older textures with my cloudmaps and see what you think.

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "October.dds"
NightTexture "land_ocean_ice_lights_aurora_8k.dds"

SpecularTexture "Earth16kSpec.dds"
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.51 ]
SpecularPower 25.0
HazeColor [ 0.50 0.7 2.0 ]
HazeDensity 0.35
Radius 6378.140 # equatorial
# Oblateness 0.0034

NormalMap "Earth-NorMap-16k.dds"
# BumpMap "earthbump.*"
# BumpHeight 4.5

Atmosphere {
Height 75
Lower [ 0.43 0.52 0.65 ]
Upper [ 0.26 0.47 0.84 ]
Sky [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
Sunset [ 1.0 0.6 0.2 ]
# Sunset [ 0.3 1.0 0.5 ]
CloudHeight 10
CloudSpeed 00
CloudMap "New-Northern-Summer-Clouds_8kDDS.dds"
}

CustomOrbit "vsop87-earth"
EllipticalOrbit {
Period 1.0000
SemiMajorAxis 1.0000
Eccentricity 0.0167
Inclination 0.0001
AscendingNode 348.739
LongOfPericenter 102.947
MeanLongitude 100.464
}

RotationPeriod 23.9344694 # 23.93419
Obliquity -23.45
RotationOffset 280.5 # offset at default epoch J2000

Albedo 0.30
}

Of course most of you will not be using all the same textures I am using so I wouldn?€™t recommend replacing your Earth entries with mine but simply jot down the settings for haze color and density and make the changes to your solarsys.ssc. Then give them a try.

Now on to a few other things. I have been pondering a little over the new seasonal textures of Earth. What I have come up with is that after finishing the season textures I am going to kind of replicate what was done with the original BlueMarble texture a few years ago. What I mean is that the original texture was originally supposed to show Earth with a maximum amount of vegetation. But the simple fact is that although they attempted that, the texture never really properly displayed this information. I found in many areas that the seasonal vegetation that was to be at its maximum showed a great deal of dead vegetation. Now with these new textures I will be able to combine the maximum vegetation data together for an all encompassing single Earth texture for those that don?€™t want to deal with all 12 seasons. This texture would then be used to replace my Realistic Earth texture and as a base for a new Pale Blue Dot texture to replace the present one. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that BlueMarble didn?€™t release a new cloudmap to go along with the new textures. As I have stated in the past I have seen renders Earth using new cloudmap data, so am sure there are a least a few new cloudmaps. I can however try and integrate new data into the old cloudmap to make some new ones. I am at least going to make a spring and autumn cloudmap for use with the textures.
Ok I am starting to ramble on here. I will keep everyone updated as best I can.

Don. Edwards

danielj,
Sorry about the 4k Northern Summer clouds. I will replace the zip ASAP. As for the cloud shadows, the ones on Motherload will not fit with these new cloudmaps as I never did release the shadows for them. Most of this was just oversite, but the original plans for Earth Central's redesign got so out of control at the time I had to scale things back. I do have cloud shadow textures made so I can upload them. I will see what I can put together and setup links with instructions. No one has any idea the plans I had for Earth Central. It really was going to be a huge site. But my lack of expertice with html, time constriants, and other factors just brought the whole thing crashing down. Now there are 12 textures to deal with and so its yet time again for and udate to the site. I have somone reworking the present sites code and hope to have a new updated version soon. I will probably scale back on the cool looking glass orb graphics as it is quite time consuming to make them. So I think some of you may be a little disapointed in were the site goes in terms of design. But at this point it is a wait and see thing.

Don.

Don. Edwards wrote:danielj, ...(clip) I think some of you may be a little disapointed in were the site goes in terms of design. But at this point it is a wait and see thing. Don.

Don, we are delighted by your textures, so don't worry for your web pages.
As my father told me many years ago,
"... a dress is only a container, the important is what is IN the dress!"
Bye and thank you for all your work, I'm waiting anxiously for the cloud shadows.
Bye

Andrea

Don. Edwards wrote:Sorry about the 4k Northern Summer clouds. I will replace the zip ASAP. Don.

Thanks for that, and remember I saw that some links don't works (especially Earthseasonal clouds maps) when I try to verify the links (what maps are really avaible) for my catalog... But, even if some textures were foundable in the impulse repertory, I have encountered some pb with 2 or 3 zip files, downloaded but can't open them (don't have I ever said that? It seems to me...):
NS-SW 4k png
NW-SS 4K png
and (new)Northern-Summer clouds 4k png.
Other items and dds ones seem to be ok. Jeam (but don't try openning the 8k and 16k, waiting for better graphic card..) Hope this help.

Don,

your above Earth textures are very nice and correspond in their /coloration/ closely to how my own Earth textures look and how I always thought the Earth should look like if viewed from space.

More recently, however, I have carefully inspected a number of high quality, hires photographs of Earth taken from various spacecraft. It is apparent beyond doubt that the Earth looks /strongly/ different in reality.

Its appearance is much more /sharply and brightly blue/ notably towards the Earths periphery, of course. Looking straight down there is more red, that is easily explained using standard atmospheric physics.

My interpretation of these facts is about like so:

The way you (and I) tend to do the Earth's colors corresponds to how it would look like with all the atmospheric effects subtracted. Hence it is probably correct to continue doing the textures as we both like them (concerning coloration).

At the same time, it becomes increasingly overdue that Chris starts at last to redo planetary atmospheres from scratch. This is indeed high up on his todo list, as he wrote me a few days ago. Whether this todo list will have a chance of being realized, only time can tell...

Bye Fridger

Cripes...new computer again! Can someone give me some money...?

Don:

Great job on the new Earth textures. Please help clear up a bit of confusion. Your haze entry in the ssc for Earth is:

HazeColor [ 0.50 0.7 2.0 ]
HazeDensity 0.35

I thought color and haze ranges in the statement were from [0.0 to 1.0]? Is there such a thing as a valid entry of "2.0" for a haze color?

Frank

I am not sure, I have it set to those settings and everything works so I assume something is going on. But I caould be wrong.

Don.

Hi Don,

I want to emphasize that your new 16k Earth textures are really excellent. Also your 4k clouds are nice as to the impression of the clouds. Very fluffy and natural looking.

Yet I think with any reasonable probability, the number of hurricans is just FAR too high on our planet . In addition, my card can handle movement with 4k clouds. So your hurricans are drifting to strange places...

Bye Fridger

Fridger,
I have researched the info about hurricane, typhoon, and tropical storm numbers at any given time durring the peak season. If anything I am short a few. There are several areas they generate and by simply looking at ths year alone one can see that there have been several at any given time. These storms are Earths natrual air conditioners, that is the help the Earth cool and balance its temperatures. With global warming is it any suprise that we are seeing a few more of them each year as the Earth's weather system is atemping to keep things in balance.
As for them drifting over the land in Celestia there is an easy fix and you know what it is. The alternative is to go back to using the same old boring BlueMarble cloud texture that we all used for years.

Don.

Don. Edwards wrote:Fridger,
I have researched the info about hurricane, typhoon, and tropical storm numbers at any given time durring the peak season. If anything I am short a few. There are several areas they generate and by simply looking at ths year alone one can see that there have been several at any given time. These storms are Earths natrual air conditioners, that is the help the Earth cool and balance its temperatures. With global warming is it any suprise that we are seeing a few more of them each year as the Earth's weather system is atemping to keep things in balance.
As for them drifting over the land in Celestia there is an easy fix and you know what it is. The alternative is to go back to using the same old boring BlueMarble cloud texture that we all used for years.

Don.

Don,

on your 4k clouds, I count 5 simultaneous /major/ hurricanes which look very much like at least grade 3! I have never heard of any reports that we were confronted on Earth with so many major storms at one given time! Typically the most I can remember are time coincidences of one big storm each in the caribics and in asia. But certainly not 5 such monsters simultaneously.

Your stroms have a huge rotational pattern and a very clearly defined eye, characteristic for very dangerous hurricans that would never be missed by the media.

This year we had indeed lots of hurricans and taifuns but NOT simultaneously.

Bye Fridger

Well I can't tell you how the news is carried overseas but here we only here about hurricanes either in the Caribbean or in the East Pacific Ocean. The East Pacific is a very big hot spot for hurricanes and sponds them one after the other all summer long and long into autumn and often more than one at a time. These storms form all the time, but we only here about them when they are threatening a populated land mass. As long as they go out into the oceans and don't bother populated areas we never here about them. The Pacific Ocean nearly covers half the planet and it is fairly uninhabited for the most part by humans. And not all the storms you see in my cloudmap are true hurricanes or typhoons. A tropical storm which is basically a hurricane in it infancy has very strong rotation and a defined eye wall many times. Again as an example look to the hurricane season we just had here in the Atlantic / Caribbean basins, an unprecedented 24 named storms all forming one right after the other and many forming while the others were still full fledged hurricanes. To put this to rest I supply the following NASA images.
The first shows 4 Cyclones, that?€™s what hurricanes are called in the Indian Ocean, stretching across the ocean all active at the same time.



The second shows 2 Typhoons in close proximity in the Western Pacific Ocean.



And the last shows 3 Atlantic hurricanes that are fully formed at the same time. Hurricane Emily is just visible in the very bottom.



So as you see my storm count is quite within normal parameters. I did check the data before making the cloudmaps. So at any given time during the tropical storm season there will be several of these beasts moving around at the same time, the Northern Hemisphere does see more activity than the Southern Hemisphere does, But that could be changing as last year there was a freak hurricane off the coast of Brazil in the South Atlantic. There have been some questions as to if it truly reached hurricane force, but it did form, it had strong rotation, and it did have the characteristic eye of most hurricanes. I hope this puts to rest your questions about why I have the number of storms I do have, As a matter of fact, My Southern Summer cloudmap has the four Indian Ocean cyclones in it taken from the above image.

Don. Edwards