New versions of Ida and Dactyl

[jestr]

I have made some new textures and models for Ida and Dactyl,based on the Galileo images-well the model for Ida isnt really mine its the standard model smoothed out a little.The texture for Ida is part real,part fantasy,and the model and textures for Dactyl are based on one Galileo photo from 1993.Heres some pictures


Ive made 2 different versions for anyone with Celestia v1.3.2 pre10 or 11 ,I have made cmod versions of the models,get it here
http://celestiamotherlode.net/creators/jestr/Ida_Dactyl_Celestia_1_3_2pre10_or_newer.zip
For other versions of Celestia,with 3ds models download this one
http://celestiamotherlode.net/creators/jestr/Ida_Dactyl_Celestia_1_3_1.zip
I have included DDS and JPG textures in the addon but you should delete the ones you dont want to use or it may cause problems.Hope you like them Jestr

[ANDREA]

I have made some new textures and models for Ida and Dactyl.

Hello Jestr, very very beautiful, as usual, thank you!

Andrea

[Guest]

Sigh, I wish ATI cards supported textures on models larger than 2048x1024 :~/

[piellepi]

Hi Guest!
I have a ATI card in my PC, too. It's a 9600 with 256MB on it! (not so bad!)
But I am also confined to 2k textures: my only resort (waiting for a newer card...) is to downsize 4k textures to 2k and wait...
Bye
Pierluigi

[TERRIER]

Hope you like them Jestr

Yep, I really like your attempt at Dactyl, and here's the Galileo image !


regards,
TERRIER

[Bob Hegwood]

Mr. Jestr,

Absolutely beautiful CMODs, and I just wanted to thank you for the effort.
These look fantastic on my machine - even though I'm limited to only 1k
textures for non-spherical objects on my Brain-Dead machine.

You have much *talent* there son... Thanks very much.

Take care, Bob

[granthutchison]

Hi Jestr:
Great texture - it's good to get rid of the blanks on the photomosaic. I think it would be nice to incorporate your Ida texture into Celestia, and use the current photomosaic texture, with its various blanks, as the limit-of-knowledge instead.
One comment, though ... it looks like you've matched the colour to one of the various false-colour images available out there. Ida (like Phobos and Deimos, unlike Eros and Gaspra) is actually pretty much plain grey: see the comment under "Views of Ida and Dactyl" here, for example.

Gaspra next?

Grant

[jestr]

Thanks Grant do what you want with the addon of course,actually I tried to match the colour of Ida to these images here
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/ida.jpg&imgrefurl=http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/ida.html&h=674&w=1152&sz=48&tbnid=pgmPCc9AjVwJ:&tbnh=87&tbnw=148&start=17&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dida%252Basteroid%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8
,where it says they are representative of what you might see with your eyes.Of course I bow to your superior wisdom and it would be a fairly simple matter to change the colour scheme.I have already done Gaspra,and all the other asteroids included with the standard install package.I could package them all together in one addon,but I was thinking of waiting a bit to see if a new finished version 1.3.2 of Celestia is on the horizon as it would simplify matters,(with Replace commands it would make it a lot easier for everyone to install).I could just make two different addons though for people using Celestia 1.3.2 pre10-11 and for people using other versions.How about the colour scheme for Mathilde-from what I could find on the web it seems all the Near images are brightness enhanced,and actually it would be a very dark,kinda charcoal like colour-typical C-type asteroid-is this true?And what about the others,I have tried to look into it but there are a variety of differing colours or no colours for most of them.Any help would be much appreciated.Jestr

[granthutchison]

Hi Jestr:
Thanks for the link. One of life's great mysteries must be how one violet image and two infrared images could ever be processed to give "natural colour"! The bizarreness of this claim is highlighted if you scroll down to the Ida and Dactyl image on the same webpage (4th picture down) where you'll see a slightly paler shade of brown described as "enhanced", and the phrase "a 'natural' color picture of this asteroid would appear mostly gray". NASA really needs to employ a proofreader ...

Mathilde is dark grey, but in sunlight against black space it's going to appear fairly bright - plain mid-grey seems about as good as anything.
The radar-imaged asteroids obviously don't have colour data associated with them, but there might be spectral data out there to give us a clue.

Grant

[jestr]

Grant,thanks for your help on this,it seems a shame to make them all grey though,I'll try it though.At the moment I am working on a higher resolution version of my Gaspra texture.I have been referencing this picture here

Obviously the one on the left-do you think this is accurate or maybe tone it down a bit?This is what my Mathilde looks like at the moment (with no ambient light),as I made the texture darker though it lost some of the detail-a difficult compromise,and the texture is so dark it is difficult to tone down the blue/purple colours,I think I will try again though.

Let me know what you think of it so far,Jestr

[Cham]

Sorry, double post.

[Cham]

Jestr,

did you modified the Gaspra and Mathilde meshes ? I think they need some small corrections. Both models have some hard "edges" that should be smoothed out. They feels very unatural in Celestia.

[granthutchison]

Jestr:
Looking at the spectral classification and B-V colour indices for the Celestia asteroids, they seem to break down into three broad categories:

Just plain grey:
Ceres, Pallas, Golevka, Kleopatra, 1998 KY26
(Mathilde, too)

Yellowish brown, like the distribution Eros texture:
Eros, Gaspra, Toutatis, Geographos, Bacchus

Grey with a hint of brown:
Juno, Vesta, Ida

So far I haven't found any photometry for Castalia.

Your Gaspra image looks oddly overcooked to me ... the JPL Planetary Photojournal has the version below, which matches the butterscotch shades of published Eros images (consistent with the fact the two bodies have very similar colour indices).

At least this one has two visible colour channels (violet, green), but again the presence of an IR channel makes the result a little suspect. S-type asteroids are really just a little browner than lunar lavas, so I do wonder if my Eros texture isn't a little too yellow.

Grant

[jestr]

Thanks for all your work on this Grant,I couldnt find out much on Castalia either,I will go back and tone them down a bit now.Jestr