Celestia Forums

I made a water jovian texture a few days ago and put it into a few randm systems where they should exist....I loaded it into celestia's extrasolar database as an alternate texture but when I right clicked it and chose water texture it came up completley white........am I doing something wrong or what?

Here's what I put

AltSurface "custom water jaovian texture" "HD 82943/c"
{

Texture "Waterjoviantexture-0-1-0-0.dds"
}

Help would be much apreciated.

Normally, you have several folders like this:

Create a folder "your_folder" and put into the Celestia/extras folder.
In "your_folder" you have got textures/hires/Waterjoviantexture-0-1-0-0.dds
and a scc file "your_ssc" with these line (your exemple):

Gahh it isn't working! I'm doing all I'm supposed to and it's still white!!!!

What version of Celestia do you use ? What is your graphic card ? How size is your picture ? What is your Operating system (linux, mac or windows ?)?... You must specify more details about your computer .
Try also update your graphic driver.

White means Celestia can't read the image texture file. It might be misnamed, in the wrong folder, the wrong size, or something other than jpg, png or dds. Remember it has to be a power of 2 on a side (e.g. 1024x512).

Also, I think I read in another thread somewhere/sometime that DDS files can only be displayed by certain graphics cards or render paths.

Is that right Selden, or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Chuft-Captain,

You are correct. DDS textures were first introduced in DX7 and was later adopted by OpenGL. It is not supported by Microsoft's software implementation of OpenGL, for example.

Sorry: I don't know which version of OpenGL added it. After 1.1, though.

Chuft-Captain wrote:Also, I think I read in another thread somewhere/sometime that DDS files can only be displayed by certain graphics cards or render paths.

Is that right Selden, or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Only very old cards are unable to use DDS files (or specifically, DDS files with DXT compressed textures.) Any NVIDIA GeForce or ATI Radeon card can use DDS files, as can any recent Intel integrated graphics chipset. The render path doesn't affect whether you can use DDS files; they're even available in the basic render path.

--Chris

Ok then my celestai version is the current 4.1......my graphics card is a NIVDIA GE force 6100....I use windows and the image is 4050X2025 Sorry for not including those details

Finally heres is the pic incase anyone wishes to see it or whatever.

In fact, your picture must be 4096x2048 or 2048x1024 (power of 2) and etc... but not above 8192x4096.

Darkness nova wrote:and the image is 4050X2025

That's your problem.

Celestia requires that all surface textures be a power of two on a side. A "4K" surface texture must be 4096x2048 (or 4096x4096).

This restriction is in the graphics hardware. Only the very most recent top-of-the-line 3D cards can use surface textures that aren't a power of two. The next version of Celestia is expected to allow non-power-of-two textures.

Wow I feel stupid. Heh it's working now thanks..... Here it is in celestai if anyone wants to comment on it.



Click on the image for a larger view.

Now if only I could add some kind of an atmosphere....

Sorry about the double post but how would I add rings or an atmosphere to this planet? I looked and kinda sorta have the gist if rigns but I wouldn't know where to put them.....and I haven't found aything on atmospheres.

Take a look at the solarsys.ssc file you have just removed; it includes ring declarations for Saturn and the other gas giants. Cut and paste the bit which describes the rings, and place it in your own planet's .ssc description.

Now you wil need a texture to define the rings. This texture needs to be a partially transparent .png with an alphachannel or you will have solid rings. Note that the .png basically defines a thin slice of the rings- the program converts that slice into a radial pattern.

Here is a fictional ring system I have made


you can see how the light shines through the transparent parts of the ring to define the shadows on the planet surface.

Incidentally you can use that solarsystem.ssc as a source of atmosphere declarations too; play about with all the values and see what works.
Warning; don't change the solarsystem.ssc file itself in the Data folder in Celestia, as this could mess up the display of our local planets. If you want to change our solar system, always use Modify commands or similar in the Extras folder.