Celestia Forums

This 16k texture for Earth's moon is a merging of the high-resolution Clementine greyscale mosaic map with a medium resolution Clementine color mosaic map for color, color corrected to better match lunar astrophotography. Unlike previous Moon textures, the Clementine color data has been mapped to correct RGB channels.




This 4k texture for Io is a merging of a high-resolution true color hemisphere imaged by the Galileo mission (JPL/Nasa), a high-resolution greyscale mosaic of Io by Tony Rosanova at USGS Flagstaff, and three lower resolution color images of Io from the Galileo mission.




I'll be adding a limit of knowledge mask soon (basically, terrain poleward of 80 N/S is dubious)

Both textures available for download in .dds format, and .png for Io, at http://laika.012webpages.com/celestia/index.htm

These are loverly textures
Thank you sombrehombre.

I've just tried Io (with a normalmap), and I must admit it's very well done !

Gone to the Moon.

I've also prepared a set of 16k textures for Earth (surface, specular map,
bump map, and night lights) and 8k clouds, primarily for the Orbiter
space simulator. They are similar to Don's Realistic Earth, but are
entirely 16k with no upsampling from the lower res Space Graphics
render Earth.

Realising that the VT revolution passed me by before I ever heard of
Celestia, is there any interest in a port of these to a Celestia friendly
(.dds) format? Most of the heavy contributers seem to have already
progressed to 32k VT, and my textures don't compare well (except
where I made local edits) to the screenshots I've seen of DBrady's
work.

Some screenshots comparing my 16k Earth textures with the version
of the Blue Marble textures shipped with Orbiter are available here:

http://www.moonport.org/orbiterforum/cg ... 1075370665

Darkmiss: I sent you an email regarding Voyager.

I want BAAAAD your 16k texture of the Earth !

Take it to Celestia faaaaast !

As of yet I do not have any Virtual textures
I prefer the single dds's so far.

So if you would release it single before you chop it up please

Nice colours, and a great night texture. I think many people will like to use your textures!

Okay, I'll post four files:
1) 16k surface/ 16k specular - which differ markedly from BM in sea-ice, so really should downloaded together - is .dds acceptable for spec fmaps?
2) 8k lights - tiny file, but higher res not done yet.
3) 8k clouds - should I bother? Only advantage is more realistic arctic/antarctic coverage.
3) 16k bump - should I bother? Its only 8-bit - maybe I can find a 16-bit bump->normal converter that wouldn't require pulling out the old compiler.

Darkmiss wrote:As of yet I do not have any Virtual textures
I prefer the single dds's so far.

Darkmiss,
You haven't lived until you've viewed earth with 32K VT's!

I can't believe you haven't tried out any yet- and if you've got a slow connection (like I do myself) I STRONGLY urge you to download them at a net cafe & burn them on CD for yourself!

sombrehombre wrote:This 4k texture for Io is a merging of a high-resolution true color hemisphere imaged by the Galileo mission (JPL/Nasa), a high-resolution greyscale mosaic of Io by Tony Rosanova at USGS Flagstaff, and three lower resolution color images of Io from the Galileo mission.

I've been wanting a 4k(+) texture of Io in dds format, and this will do nicely, thanks.

Are you planning to convert your 16k dds Moon texture to a VT, sombrehombre ?

regards
TERRIER

PS
Paul
I've got to second what Jack has just said. It's worth downloading the BlueMarble VT, and viewing it on it's own as an alternate texture, if you have the chance to download it.

Beautiful Moon man.Great work,Jestr

Terrier:

I don't plan on reissuing this Moon as a VT.

In the works is another version of the Moon, with 1) superior matching of
highland/maria albedo (artificially exaggerated in the 750nm/near-IR
greyscale source) to true-color CCD imagery, while retaining contrast in
both, 2) less color saturation (this moon, while clearly showing distinct
reddish and bluish lava flows, is about 20-30% oversaturated compared
to 3-color CCD and naked eye observations, and 3) a 16k bumpmap,
comprised of a 4 pixel/degree (1.4 k) true elevation map from
stereophotography supplemented with 45 pixel/degree (16k) finer detail
from filtering operations. It should also be free of 3 local bugs in this
Moon that I'm aware of.

THAT version, which will supplant the current one, will be released as a VT.

In my experience, .jpg/.png works fine up to 2k, and .dds up to 8k, but
the system starts hanging at the 16k level, so I think there and up
should be the domain of VTs. I don't have any experience making them,
so thought I'd put this one up for downloading/comment (and please do
criticise - I've got a tough skin).

Now that my version of the pre-bumped Viking color/MDM1 map in 16k is
out for Orbiter (really easy), I should be able to make initial .dds of the
Earth textures (as seen above), and THEN (woohoo), I should have my
hands on prelim Mariner 10 photomosaics from Mark Robinson at NWU to
make a georgeous 8k Mercury... Then I'll return the Moon to drydock.

JackHiggins wrote:

Darkmiss wrote:As of yet I do not have any Virtual textures
I prefer the single dds's so far.

Darkmiss,
You haven't lived until you've viewed earth with 32K VT's!

I can't believe you haven't tried out any yet- and if you've got a slow connection (like I do myself) I STRONGLY urge you to download them at a net cafe & burn them on CD for yourself!

Okay, okay, ill try it
So what one would you recomend, in your opinoin ?

what about Spec, Normal, Cloud, and night textures
Do they have to be virtual to ?

sombrehombre,
My Realistic Earth textures are not upsamples of Space-Graphics textrues. If you go back and read carefully you will see that the only component from S-G that was used and upsampled were the oceans. The landmasses were taken from Blue-Marbles 21k textrues and carefully reacolored to be more acurate and downsampled 16k.
Besides my Realistic Earth textures are old news. They were replaced in December by updated textures. I just never broke the links to old textures. But they are coming down from the server very soon. So in all fairness you should be comparing anything you do to my latest work not something well over 9 months old.

BTW,
I have yet another new 16k texture ready for release very shortly, along with 16k cloudmap if all goes well.

Don. Edwards

Don,

I saw your gallery, and I'm impressed with your HD 28185 add-on. Where can I find it ? Can you share it ?

I'm particularly interested in the lava moons and the Jupiter like texture.

I didn't mean to slight your work in the least - my understanding from
the text I read on your site was that RE was based on the SG Render
Earth (which, AFAIK, is at ~10.5k), and that you had patched it with
the ocean from your 32k Earth in progress.

The main reason I did mine is that my favorite of the lot, SGs Render
Earth, was only 10.5k, and had the poor sea-ice, land-sea interface,
and cloud/masking of any texture based directly off Reto Stockli's BM.
But going directly to Reto's sources you can more or less fix everything.

In truth, NONE of the earth textures are particularly realistic - reviewing
the Apollo film/TV coverage from outside of LEO, the best rendition so
far is that done by ARC Science for their rather expensive "Face of the
Earth" texture (http://www.arcscience.com/face.htm) - I
found some pallette manipulations that tranformed Blue Marble close
to this, but my target audience (Orbiter users) kvetched that it was too
desaturated. So my version is a compromise between Face of the Earth
and the Shuttle photography in the books "The Home Planet" and
"Orbit" - which is ALSO color adjusted (as all film product is) to better
match expectations. Then there's the issues of older film pigments saturating/decaying at different rates, etc.

The MODIS images BM is based on are 'color-corrected' to remove Raleigh scattering - I think 1) they over adjust, and 2) there doesn't appear to be very good realtime atmospheric haze rendering in either
simulator. So you pick some point on the curve (view from surface -> view from high-orbit) to use.

Darkmiss,

The best site for the bluemarble 32k texture was http://www.marfig.com/celestia - unfortunately this is no longer online...

For Spec, night and normalmaps, a good place to start would be Jens' site at http://home.arcor.de/jimpage/ (also lots of other planetary textures)

DBrady has put together some fantastic bumpless 16k mars textures, and 32k normalmap textures for mars on http://www.electronics.dit.ie/dbrady/celestia/index.htm

I can't find any more right at the moment- hopefully someone else will expand the list & tell you where you can find the original 32k BlueMarble texture mirrored!

Darkmiss you can get Waltons texture here
http://exp.arc.nasa.gov/downloads/celestia/extras
(the file is called bm_vtex.zip).It looks a little green though to me,still looks excellent detail though.I have a bluer 64k size(43k detail) one on my FTP site
ftp://celestia:addons@81.111.74.239
Its gonna take a few weeks to download PNG but the JPG version is a lot smaller.I made a DDS version but it didnt look nearly as good as JPG version (it was only DXT1 though,but it was as big as PNG),I've also got 32kNormal,Spec maps to go with and 16kNight.I've found it looks better if I play about with the spec colour and haze settings in ssc.As I said its slow but these VT's are so big (PNG 1.6G) I cant put them on a web site.Jestr
ps I couldnt get Nasa link to work but it did for me when I copied it into my browser.

jestr

Whoa!! I never realised there was a 64k set for earth! Great! Hour or two in a quiet net cafe should do the job pretty easily, i'd say?

I've also got 32kNormal,Spec maps to go with and 16kNight.

I'd love to see the 32k spec and normalmaps- any idea when you could make them available? (Read: I want this now! now! now! ) Jens has already put a 32k nightmap online- it's a bit too orange though I think... (Link in my post above)

DBrady's 32k cloud tex should be coming sometime in the near future too- this really is the only way of viewing the Blue Marble textures.

JackHiggins wrote:Hour or two in a quiet net cafe should do the job pretty easily, i'd say?

"2 days and 14 hours remaining ..." it says here. And that's a broadband connection to the jpeg version.

Grant