Ultimate Terraformed Mars MARK V Milestone Release

[Don. Edwards]

Attention Everyone!

See Threads main first post for major update and info!

Don. Edwards

[ANDREA]

Hello Don.
As I told many times, regarding your previous creations, I mean Earth and Mars textures, I think you are a true artist and I always appreciated a lot your work.
But now I think you almost reached the perfection.
Your terraformed Mars is so "real" that I can easily imagine humans swimming in its seas, ot harvesting cultivated fields.
I already checked your Mk 3b mini 1k texture, taken from the image shown in this thread, for which I made myself the specmac, and that one was itself a pleasure for the eyes, provided you was seeing it not so close.
But now, I repeat, we are close to perfection.
I cannot wait to see how the final 8k release will be, so I'll stay tuned for it, whenever it will be ready.
So, Don, thanks a lot, very very appreciated, indeed.
IMHO you are the one!
Bye

Andrea

[Don. Edwards]

ANDREA,

The main release will be a 16K version of this texture. I wish I had a texture of Mars at 32K but 16k is as high as I have.

Don. Edwards

[ANDREA]

ANDREA, The main release will be a 16K version of this texture. I wish I had a texture of Mars at 32K but 16k is as high as I have. Don. Edwards

16K?11??
WOW!!!
Wonderful!
Bye

Andrea

[ANDREA]

At the end the original was erroneously cancelled, oh well!
It was this:
*******************************
Don, after a long vojage around your terraformed Mars, I confirm my first feeling, i.e. it's "wonderful".
I've just a little thing that I would prefer slightly modified: I feel it's a bit too dark.
I tried to modify myself the brightness/contrast using Photoshop, but I've been unable to do it, probably for my ignorance on the matter, or perehaps because the texture contains the specular one, may be so?
Anyway this is just my opinion, I would like to read other people's ones.
Bye and thank you once again.

Andrea

[ElChristou]

Perso I find it great! from space, the result is just fantastic.

Now, it's a 4k so I guess zooming too much don't make sense, but the transition land/water is a bit too crisp... also I feel the need of a few more rivers and affluents here and there. Bt these are details, the color for me is ok, even if I ask myself is the global vegetation color could not differ a bit more than the one on earth due to the difference in soil composition...

[acrosome]

Don,

Wow. You motivated me to figure out how to load new textures. That whole "change the ssc file" thing threw me for a few minutes, and I don't think that I have the normal map working properly (Olympus Mons still looks flat, for instance), but I'm still very impressed. It's beautiful, Don.

I'm really not educated enough on the subject to criticize the color scheme, but I will say that I am all for the darker almost-black vegetation, as opposed to the false-color green vegetation. It looks more natural to me.

But why are all those craters high in Terra Sabaea empty of snow and ice? I can see what appears to be semi-permanent ice or snow all around them, but many of the craters themselves have green floors, for instance Dawes. Wouldn't they be well glaciated, since there is no outflow from them? Denning's floor is at least snow-covered, undoubtedly because Denning's floor sits at a higher elevation than most of those smaller craters leading northeast from it, but I suspect that even those lower crater bottoms would glaciate.

Obviously, this is the "wetter greener" version. Are you going to make the "drier browner" version available to us? And where did you set sea level? I had decided that setting it at about 2000m below the datum produced the most interesting landscape, and it looks like your sea level is approximately that.

Dean

[Don. Edwards]

Dean,

Both versions of the texture are in the zip file. The texture named TMARS-Mark-5.1.png is the less vegetated version while the default is TMARS-Mark-5.2.png. I know that the texture can't be viewed normally because of implanting the specmap into it in the alpha channel. But it does cut back on the amount of video memory Celestia needs to use. This is for lower performance systems and system with integrated graphics. All you need to do is change the name of the texture in the .ssc file to show the texture instead of the main one.

As for the southern highlands and ice and glaciers, if I get a consensus from everyone else that I need to add more water and or more ice I can easily do that. As a rule the southern hemisphere is being kept drier simply because the main bodies of water are so spread apart unlike the wet northern hemisphere. The way the atmosphere moves and circulates would do a great job of keeping the climates in each hemisphere seperated and different. Also this is by design so to speak. Many of these craters will have porous material and could be kept drained by design to help keep a little bit of the old Mars around for posterity's sake. In many of craters it is going to be harder to keep them filled than to empty them. The amount of shock the surface at the time of impact shattered the ground. Even with the heat semi melting the the rock there would still be fractures in which the water would quickly seep into and into the deeper water table. The water table in the south is going to be quite deep compared to the north. So having dry craters would in fact be more the norm. Plus the south simply having a dryer climate it would tend to rejoin the atmosphere quicker.

As I stated there is still just a bit to do on it yet.

As ElChristou pointed out the specmap may seem a bit sharp to some, again something that be easily adjusted. As for rivers, I have been down this river before, ha ha. I have not been able to master the art of creating rivers very well free hand. Maybe its because I lack a Watcom Tablet and Pen for the fin drawing. I do all this with a bloody mouse and unfortunately it just does not do the trick. I have tried to make rivers in the natural river basins but it just does not look right. They look fake and unnatural no mater what I do. Then adding the specmap makes them look even worse. So I chose to just not make them. I have tried importing river graphic data from Earth, but it just doesn't blend well with the natural Mars surface and looks tacked on. So I chose to just not make them. There is just one and I am debating on removing it as well because I don't care for the way it looks either.

The cloudmap is going to get an overhaul as well as it is to cloudy for the dryer southern hemisphere. I also want to cut back just a bit on the amount of cloud cover. This cloudmap was just a test to get the weather patterns in place and to the proper scale. Clouds on Mars are going to made of water and as such are going to be the same size they are on Earth. Just because Mars is a smaller planet doesn't mean you get prepositionally sized clouds. The clouds and storms would actually look a bit big for the planet as I have made them. You can't change the laws of physics to soot ones aesthetic view. So in the end more of the Martian surface will be visible when things are done.

I also have the night side lightmap to contend with. Got to have one unless we are going to treat Mars as a non-human inhabited nature preserve. Not a bad idea, but I don't think you could keep anyone from settling there. So I have to start as well. the one I had made a while back with the massive cater cities is out the window. The cites were just to big and all the cites on the coastline were no longer in the right place when I dropped the sea level back down to expected levels. While that that texture was intrigueing it was far from perfect and I had a few comments on it. So it was dead along time ago.

Well back to work.

Don. Edwards

[Cham]

Don,

the texture is very nice. Thanks for making it available. However, the normalmap doesn't work well. It's not contrasted or "deep" enough.

[Don. Edwards]

It works well at 8k, so i think it may have lost its detail in the resizing. I will post a replacement ASAP.

[Victor]

First, let me say that what you've accomplished so far is absolutely amazing and totally worth all the time we've been waiting for it.

About the textures: personally, I like the one with less vegetation more, mostly because the snow-covered areas outside Tharsis (the area above Hellas, for example) blend in better. In the other texture, the snow over green areas looks a bit strange, in my opinion - one would expect that the vegetation near the snowline would be less dense, so the areas under and near the snow-covered areas should be barren or covered with some sort of alpine vegetation, not with dense forests.

Otherwise, it looks excellent!

[acrosome]

Don,

Wow. Well, my prejudices are easy enough to predict- I like the drier Mars. In particular the high, cold desert of Terra Sabaea warms my heart. Also, having Terra Cimmeria and Terra Sirenum as high, cold deserts with verdant valleys in the low areas is rather aesthetically pleasing, too. I suppose that Arabia Terra is the "breadbasket of Mars?"

I still think that the high craters should be glaciated. (And I'm not so sure that the large volcanoes would poke out of a 2 bar atmosphere enough to not be snowcapped, either.) I understand your point about how the ground is fractured, the aquifers are deep, etc. But consider this- mountains on Earth are glaciated, despite the fact that they are steep and any melt will run off. If the water is frozen, it won't drain through the fractured stone, will it? Whatever melt is lost is replaced seasonally, just like glaciated areas on Earth. I think that if you have them surrounded by snow (I'm assuming that your maps are summer composites, and that the snow you are showing on the high areas is permanent), then the craters should be glaciated. Herschel I'll buy, since it is deep enough that the bottom might be warm enough to melt seasonal snow, and I see how Newton, another deep crater, could be a verdant valley. But I think that smaller craters like Muller should be full of ice.

What are the different shades of green? Is the dark green forest/taiga and the light green plains/steppe? Or does the color not really correlate directly like that? Perhaps the light green includes some tundra? (Otherwise, there isn't much tundra- steppe just fades directly into desert.)

And, where did you set sea level for the Boreal Ocean? I thought you had it at about -2000m, but I thought that would create some very complex coastline in Lycus Sulci (icluding a little inland sea at the base of Olypus Mons), and I don't see this in your texture. Of course, I have been wrong before... : )

I'm still eagerly awaiting your climate model by the way. THAT should be interesting.

Dean

[zhar2]

Wheres the texture? i cant find it?

nvr mind, i found it.

[zhar2]

Well on my end the images apear blank, only water masks to be seen and no land.

[Don. Edwards]

zhar2,

What you are seeing is the implanting of the Specmap into the textures Alpha channel. This makes the texture look a bit strange but just load it in Celestia and you will see that it is fine. This is an old trick from years ago. It saves from having to have a separate specmap, and actually reduces the amount of video memory used. Just make sure you duplicate the setting I have in the Copyright/Readme text and you should see in all its glory. Of course it also has the benefit that it makes altering the texture much more difficult. Kind of a lame DRM if you will. As the texture is not final and I have had some textures stolen you can see where I might be a bit protective.

I am not sure if I will be doing he specmap implanting in the larger textures, but I just might. Not sure if this implanted specmap works with VTs yet.

Don. Edwards

[ElChristou]

zhar2,

What you are seeing is the implanting of the Specmap into the textures Alpha channel. This makes the texture look a bit strange but just load it in Celestia and you will see that it is fine. This is an old trick from years ago. It saves from having to have a separate specmap, and actually reduces the amount of video memory used. Just make sure you duplicate the setting I have in the Copyright/Readme text and you should see in all its glory. Of course it also has the benefit that it makes altering the texture much more difficult. Kind of a lame DRM if you will. As the texture is not final and I have had some textures stolen you can see where I might be a bit protective.

I am not sure if I will be doing he specmap implanting in the larger textures, but I just might. Not sure if this implanted specmap works with VTs yet.

Don. Edwards

Why don't you swith to dds for the public release?
For larger textures, you should have alook at Fridger's tools at CM all you need for high level mapping is there, from colormap to spec and normals...

[Don. Edwards]

Because at 4K, the DDS would look a bit rough. As for Fridger's Tools, they are only for RAW image data. We are talking of allot of image conversion and from what I understand of the tools they would not help in the building of my normalmaps because they have been altered and are no longer in the format his tools require. If his tools worked with standard out of the box images such as PNG, TGA, BMP, I might mess around with them. I also do not like the fact I have to load a bunch of other applications in which to use all his scripts. I am A simple guy and I hate dealing in lines of code, command prompts and the like. Sounds bad for a computer tech, but I have to deal with that stuff all the time, I don't want it moving into my pleasure time as is what creating textures are. I want to see what I am doing graphically, not cross my fingers and hope for the best and waste allot of time.

So that's why things from me are the way they are.

There are other reasons as well but I will not go into them in this forum.


Don. Edwards

[t00fri]

Because at 4K, the DDS would look a bit rough. As for Fridger's Tools, they are only for RAW image data. We are talking of allot of image conversion and from what I understand of the tools they would not help in the building of my normalmaps because they have been altered and are no longer in the format his tools require. If his tools worked with standard out of the box images such as PNG, TGA, BMP, I might mess around with them.

Don. Edwards

Don,

since a long time my F-TexTools read PNG (8bit grayscale & 3(4)x 8bit RGB(A)) and write both PNG and highest quality DDS formats (including GPU Turbo support [CUDA] for modern NVIDIA cards). But for normalmaps it is a different story, since one needs 16 bit level grayscale bumpmaps to get a really smooth RGB normalmap in the end, notably for monster textures. Also the normalmap tools write directly highest quality normalmap DDS (nmdxt5) format besides PNG (including GPU Turbo support [CUDA]).

Fridger

[Helios_space]

Hello Don. Edwards
Some time ago I read this forum, partly because he was waiting to finish your fantastic Blue Mars.
I have seen many features that you are commenting on your project, but I can not find the link to download the add-on. Already available for download? Or are you still doing the latest changes?
When available, Could you be kind enough to remember the download link?

Thank you very much, by the way your work is impressive, I have many textures for my planets, but never with this quality.
Greetings and excuse my English.

[Don. Edwards]

Helios_space, There is a 4k texture pack available for testing purposes, Its on the previous of this thread. You have to click the picture of T-Mars with clouds and you will start the download.

Fridger, I will have to look into your tools again then. If they can help in any way it will be good, thanx.

Don. Edwards