Celestia Forums

A new 3D model of Earth is ready for you to download. The 10 megabyte file is called oval2.cmod . A text file is ready to paste into your spacecraft.ssc file so that the planetoid orbits Earth rapidly as soon as Celestia is started.

The mountains are 360 times taller than normal. The oceans are flooding land 360 meters deep. The planetoid is oval shaped, 36 percent smaller through the poles than across the equator. The digital land heights are from a scientific database called ETOPO2. Next, Mars and Venus 3D shapes.



The link to the ftp is :
http://www.reliefglobe.com/video.html

The ftp location will have 2 files:

oval2.cmod 10 megabytes
add_to_spacecraft.ssc small text file

paste the small text into your data\spacecraft.ssc file.
put the oval2.cmod file in your \models directory
Run Celestia
You will see the 1500 mile wide "Oval mini-Earth"
rapidly orbiting close to Earth.

You can preview the planetoid here :

http://www.reliefglobe.com/warming.html


Here is the small text based on the Mir spacecraft:
___________________________________


"oval2" "Sol/Earth"
{
Class "spacecraft"
Mesh "oval2.cmod"
Radius 1500
Beginning 2446482.0 # Hotel Launched 20 Feb 2006
# Ending

# Assuming these elements to be constant isn't accurate . . .
# Celestia really needs to support better orbit models.
EllipticalOrbit {
Period 0.003
SemiMajorAxis 10000
Eccentricity 0.0
Inclination 0.0
AscendingNode 0
ArgOfPericenter 296.4901
MeanAnomaly 63.6005
}

Obliquity 180.
RotationOffset 0
EquatorAscendingNode 0

Albedo 0.40
}

[/img]

Coolness. Might I ask how exactly do you make these models?

Also, when will you release a version with textures?

You ask how the 3D model of Earth was made. I wrote a Perl program that uses the ETOPO2 database of land heights. That database has a height every 2 miles. I only use one data point every 60 miles and ignore the rest of the data. Those datapoints are used by my Perl program to make a mesh of triangles. Those triangles are in the format used by the plastics industry : .stl for stereolithography.

Once the .stl file is ready, I can make plastic prototypes with lasers firing into liquid photopolymer. The liquid turns to solid.

But if plastic is not needed, and only simulated 3D planets are wanted, then I convert the .stl to .3ds format using a tool.

The .3ds files can be used directly by Celestia (or by my competitors in the plastics industry). Then I convert the .3ds files to .cmod format using cmodconverter.exe .

Venus, Mars, and Earth have databases that the GlobeMaker software can use to make plastic globes, or simulated 3D models of planets. The moon is also possible, but only 75000 datapoints are available. Not enough.

see http://www.reliefglobe.com for pictures.

My degree is MSEE , so I know all I need of math and programming to design planetary models. High school math is not enough.

If people like the little oval2.cmod model, I can make a variety of exaggerations, inversions, oblations, and floodings for Celestia. I am looking at a 20 megabyte Earth .3ds model, but it slows down my little PC video. I may port the work to my powerful computer next to speed up the motions.

Here is Venus :

Coolness. I cleaned up the cmod file to about 90000 verticies from 360000(I think) to run a bit faster. The only thing I can't do is wrap a texture. I don't know why... Will play some more later. I would really be interested in trying out a spherical map with the altitudes cut be at least half (or more) to see if I can wrap a texture... Earth done something similar to that 20 MB Venus might do, after some smoothing and optimization we might be able to wrap it.

You also asked about adding textures to the 3D model. I do not know how to do that. Maybe you can try it, or wait for to get around to it. While you ae waiting, take a look at a Mars 3D model with 150x exaggeration of mountain heights :

GlobeMaker wrote:You also asked about adding textures to the 3D model. I do not know how to do that. Maybe you can try it, or wait for to get around to it. While you ae waiting, take a look at a Mars 3D model with 150x exaggeration of mountain heights :

YIKES! Really gives you a feel for lopsidedness.

I'm loving the new Venus model. Has anyone tried using Anim8or to add textures, or giving it a texture in the .ssc file?

By the way, a strange idea occurred to me as I was looking at these models.
I call it the Bonsai Planet. Basically, you take a nice, solid asteroid about 1/150th the size of Earth and carve it so that it looks like a combination of the land and sea floor relief globes. Then you add some soil, water, atmosphere and ecology, keeping it all in with forcefields and gravity generators.

And voila! you have your Bonsai Planet! Notice that the mountains are just as high as they are on Earth, the atmosphere is just as deep, and it looks very strange.

NoXion wrote:Has anyone tried using Anim8or to add textures, or giving it a texture in the .ssc file?

We're working on it. I haven't had any luck with the cmod files yet. But I hope to play with a 3ds soon...

Hi Buggs and NoXion,

I have put the Earth's .3ds file Buggs wants on my ftp website. It is called oval2.3ds . The file is 2 megabytes. Use the first link on this page to get there :
http://www.reliefglobe.com/video.html

I will prepare a new model of Bonsai Earth with seafloor and land shown.
I am glad you like the upcoming Venus model at high resolution. The high resolution Venus has 4.6 million facets so the .stl file size is 230 meg.
That is too big for Celestia on today's PCs, but future PCs may be able to handle it. Here is a close-up of Venus :

I just tried using an SSC file to apply a texture... no luck

I also tried anim8or... still no luck It just turned it green and blue.

http://www.reliefglobe.com link is dead. Can you repost on another file sharing site like rapidshare?

Cak.

cacjardy wrote:http://www.reliefglobe.com link is dead.

You probably didn't notice that this thread was last posted to 4 years ago, and GlobeMaker has not been seen here for at least 3 years.