3DMars update

Post #101by **ElChristou** » 21.10.2007, 22:34

Cartrite, it would be nice to put the URL of your site in your profile, this way one can access easily from any of your post...

cartrite · Post #102by **cartrite** » 21.10.2007, 22:51

Nothing fancy here, but done. I hope the site stays up for good now. I still can't access that one I tried to create today. At least it didn't become inaccessible after I uploaded all the files. I;m still wondering what is really going on.
cartrite

Post #103by **ElChristou** » 21.10.2007, 22:56

Tx Cartrite!

No need to add it to your signature, there is already a www buttons available.

cartrite · Post #104by **cartrite** » 21.10.2007, 23:05

I never used that little button. Learn something new every day. I guess I can drink some beer now. Forgot. I quit drinking a year ago now. OH WELL. I think I'll take out the link from my signature.
cartrite

Johaen · Post #105by **Johaen** » 21.10.2007, 23:59

Finally got around to trying out your 3D Mars. Very impressed.

I'm getting about 21 fps, while rendering a new 64k Earth BMNG texture.

<3

cartrite · Post #106by **cartrite** » 22.10.2007, 00:19

Glad to hear it.

That model was made using my older card, ge fx5500. I never really seen good performance from it till I upgraded my card to the 8000 series. I should probably go back to that one and finish the seams but I've been experimenting with another more accurate way of doing the model and that has been consuming all my available time.
cartrite

cartrite · Post #107by **cartrite** » 23.10.2007, 15:07

Seeing Johaen's screen shot motivated me to try and fix the seams between the texture tiles. But it seems to be impossible. I think it has something to do with normals. I'm not sure. But here is a screenshot from an affected area and the same area of the texture displayed in the gimp. The dark areas or tonal mismatches appear in Blender too but they are not as bad. So I'm not sure if this a driver problem or a normal calculation problem or if it can even be fixed.
Screen shot 1 from Celestia.

Screen shot 2 from the gimp.

Screen shot 3 from Blender. Although a seem is slightly visible in Blender, it gets a lot worse after running cmodfix to recalculate the normals.

Anybody else ever experience this?
cartrite

cartrite · Post #108by **cartrite** » 23.10.2007, 16:33

Actually, recalculating normals has nothing to do with it. I just ran the model without running cmodfix and the same thing happens. It seems to be treating each mesh separately as far as the edges are concerned. The effect also reverses with a different sun angle or a different time of year. Oh well.
cartrite

Fenerit · Post #109by **Fenerit** » 23.10.2007, 16:51

Don't worry, Cartrite. I believe that the seems can be avoided with an overlay texture (declared in the .ssc file) which is all transparent but in that region (or not?). What do you think about?

cartrite · Post #110by **cartrite** » 23.10.2007, 18:17

Fenerit,
The model has 9 meshes and you can only declare 1 texture in the ssc file.
The reason the model has 9 meshes is so each mesh can have it's own texture to increase the resolution. A planet wide texture would have to be 16k, mostly transparent to get a 2k visible texture over 1 region. That's beyond most if not all graphics cards. Beyond mine anyhow. And I'm able to get a 16k texture over the hires regions through the use of tiles. Just can't get rid of the seams.

For those who don't like the seams in the middle of the hires areas.
I did remap the uv's so the mons region and the valles region uses 1 texture.
I'm going to upload the model later today or tonight. It uses 2 8k textures for the hi resolution areas. That would be equal to using the 4k tiles in those regions but without the seams. I think only 8000 series cards can handle this size. It also has a 4k normalmap for each hires region. It compresses to about 21 mb. For those who's card can only handle a 4k texture, The 8k textures will have to be scaled down. They will be in jpg format because I don't have the space for png files. The package compressed to 124 mb with png textures.

Just as a reminder, this update does not include any of the ultra hires regions shown on pages 3, 4, 5, etc of this thread. It only repairs the seams inside the hires regions. There are still seams and holes around the edges of the hires regions.

cartrite

Fenerit · Post #111by **Fenerit** » 23.10.2007, 18:34

Thanks for the informations.

cartrite · Post #112by **cartrite** » 23.10.2007, 19:02

I did remodel the tile version. Here is a screen shot that comes close to the image Johaen posted.

This an improvement. But not 100%. This uses different textures that are not compatible with the current version of the model. This model uses texture that were cropped at 8193x4097 and scaled to 8k. This was so they can overlap and the uv tex coordinates fall short from the edge of the mesh. This model will be able to display a virtual 16k texture over the Valles region. Is there any interest in this one?

Here is a shot from the same area using one 8k texture for the mesh. Different model package.

I planning on deleting the current model from my site and uploading both of these. Also the 8k tiles currently on the site will be replaced with the ones described above. The models have the same amount of verticies. The uv coords are just mapped differently.

cartrite

cartrite · Post #113by **cartrite** » 25.10.2007, 10:11

Well,
The site went down again. The other site came up again. I couldn't log into the other site again. This is screwed up. I'm not going to mess with this anymore. I deleted the page on my email account with links to the new site. I never uploaded anything anyhow. If and when the original site comes back up, I don't know, I may delete that too. SORRY.
Maybe some day I'll try this again.
Edit: In order to deal with this on again, off again web site I got, In the future, I'm just going to edit my profile to include the web site or not include it.
cartrite

axiomatic · Post #114by **axiomatic** » 26.10.2007, 12:37

Hi! I'm new to Celestia but old to computers-and just about everything else. I'm an old lady with an old NVidia card who just downloaded a driver update and can now view Celestia 1.5.3 Opera with only 1 Meg Ram and your lovely picture (with the assist of Advanced Ram Recovery). Without the aid of all ou great guys and gals out here I don't know what a nerdly eldarly person like me would do for entertainment. Me and my Nvidia GForce 440 are now happily homeschooling the grandkids. At only 5yrs and 4yrs of age they are scaring all the adults around them (giggle). It takes a community to raise a few good nerds.
Many thanks!

cartrite · Post #115by **cartrite** » 26.10.2007, 12:38

This clip shows the Mars Express data only version of the experimental model
I'm working on. It's kind of crude and shows the amount of work still to be done but.............
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-qEkKP1u-k
Scaling this clip down this much looks like it removed all the stars at the end.
Oh well. If my site comes back up I'll upload the full resolution avi file which uses the Xvid4 codec.
cartrite

BobHegwood · Post #116by **BobHegwood** » 26.10.2007, 13:15

axiomatic wrote:8O Hi! I'm new to Celestia but old to computers-and just about everything else. I'm an old lady with an old NVidia card who just downloaded a driver update and can now view Celestia 1.5.3 Opera with only 1 Meg Ram and your lovely picture (with the assist of Advanced Ram Recovery). Without the aid of all ou great guys and gals out here I don't know what a nerdly eldarly person like me would do for entertainment. Me and my Nvidia GForce 440 are now happily homeschooling the grandkids. At only 5yrs and 4yrs of age they are scaring all the adults around them (giggle). It takes a community to raise a few good nerds.
Many thanks!

Welcome there Granny... :lol:

I'm also an old, OLD geezer, but I LOVE this Celestia stuff. I ran it for 3
years on a 1994 Windows XP machine with NO graphics card, and now I've
just spent my life savings (exaggeration) on a new PC just for Celestia.

Better keep the kids away from Celestia though... They'll get HOOKED.
Then, you'll never get to play with it again. :wink:

We better get OUT of this topic though... These focussed people don't
like it when you post non-topic posts in their forums. <smirk>

Take care, Brain-Dead Geezer Bob

cartrite · Post #117by **cartrite** » 26.10.2007, 13:42

Hi axiomatic,
Welcome. Not sure which image you liked but if it's one of mine, thank you. As for "non-topic posts", I don't mind but someone else might. At least it shows people are looking at it which is why it's here in the first place.
cartrite

cartrite · Post #118by **cartrite** » 31.10.2007, 22:49

This is close to the dimensions of the new model I'm creating coverage wise.
The actual texture is about 25 meters per pixel. It's a mosaic from h0344 and h0360 from the Mars Express obtained from HRSCview. Freie Universitaet Berlin and DLR Berlin, http://hrscview.fu-berlin.de/ I don't know how much detail will be in the mesh but I'm one step closer to actually doing this.

This combined dem mosaic that was created along with this texture will also be used as the shapefile for the ctx mosaic I'm working on from the same area. That's going to be 6 meter per pixel resolution. I may also use this to create a close up VT.
cartrite

cartrite · Post #119by **cartrite** » 01.12.2007, 09:53

I took some screen shots after correcting one of the problems I had with one of the high resolution Mars Express dems h344. Getting there. I get about 19 fps.
Some model stats.

cartrite

cartrite · Post #120by **cartrite** » 03.12.2007, 01:14

I captured another clip from the model and uploaded it to you tube. It's a little better then the last. Still need to work on my flying skills though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrJYZxJmtY
The full resolution video is at my web site.
cartrite