New to Celestia, need help please.

[johndian]

I just found Celestia,and it is going to be a real time saver for my graphics work, however I do have a few questions for those in the know.
I am a pro graphics artist, not an astronomer or a game maker( my hats off to those talents).
I have four basic questions.
(1) can I render straight to file using another rendering engine (v-ray or similar)
(2) if not , can i render an hdr image straight out of box or with a script
(3) what are the highest resolution maps available and where can I get them.
(4) why is Celestia the biggest graphics secret ever kept

I am using a fairly high end graphics computer ( Dual 3 gig intel viiv, 4 gig of ram, 1tb drive space, nvidia 7800 with 256 meg of ram and a 21 inch wide screen monitor.
Thanks in advance

John

[Hungry4info]

(3) what are the highest resolution maps available and where can I get them.

There's lots of resources at the Celestia Motherlode, www.celestiamotherlode.net

(4) why is Celestia the biggest graphics secret ever kept

We obviously need to do some more advertising

[John Van Vliet]

edit 2:48 pm

[selden]

Well, it's not all that secret. There were almost 2,000,000 downloads of v1.4.1 from SourceForge. That doesn't include the copies that are distributed by the various Linux repositories and by sites that distribute free software for Windows and Mac OS.

Unfortunately, Celestia does not support direct rendering to a file. The largest image it can create is the same as the highest resolution your screen can display.

In principle, someone could link Celestia to an OpenGL library which writes arbitrarily sized images to files, but I haven't seen any report of anyone doing that.

[zhar2]

Well, it's not all that The largest image it can create is the same as the highest resolution your screen can display.

A thats why it crashes with textures bigger than 4000x2000 pixels.

[selden]

Well, it's not all that The largest image it can create is the same as the highest resolution your screen can display.

A thats why it crashes with textures bigger than 4000x2000 pixels.

If large textures cause Celestia to crash, then either you have buggy OpenGL drivers or you've encountered a bug in Celestia. Please report the details.

Texture sizes are limited by the size of your graphics card's texture buffer, not by the screen size. Lots of people use textures larger than 4Kx2K with Celestia. When a larger texture is provided to Celestia for use on a spherical object, it cuts it into smaller pieces which will fit into the card's buffer. When applying a texture to a 3D model, however, Celestia can't do that, so the textures used with a 3D model do have to fit into the card's texture buffer. If you want them to work on all (modern) systems, this means you must limit the size of your model textures to 1K on a side. (Ancient 3dfx cards, for example, could not use textures larger than 256 pixels on a side.) Microsoft's OpenGL software drivers and many embedded chipsets are still limited to 1K textures.

[John Van Vliet]

edit 2:47 pm

[zhar2]

Well thak you very much for the info, very helpfull, i managed to fix it by tweaking a bit around with its settings which where to their minimum and now even larger textures work without lag or crashing.

[johndian]

Thanks so much for all the response's so far. I have been reading the post on how to fix the artifact problems (ie turn on the AntialiasingSamples function in the cfg file) use higher quality maps, use nhancer, etc. This truly is a remarkable piece of software. The programmers and support staff have created a graphics masterpiece. If someone could write a plugin (hint,hint) that would let you render at your graphics card highest resolution independent of what your screen would display, that would be heaven.

Again thanks.

John

[selden]

John,

That's something that the primary author, Chris Laurel, would have to do.

The best place to report enhancement requests is on SourceForge at
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_ ... tid=371302

You'll have to get a (free) SourceForge account to post there, however.