Textures & Add-on Downloads, For new Celestia users.

Tips for creating and manipulating planet textures for Celestia.
Topic author
Darkmiss
Posts: 1059
Joined: 20.08.2002
With us: 22 years 3 months
Location: London, England

Textures & Add-on Downloads, For new Celestia users.

Post #1by Darkmiss » 26.12.2002, 21:05

Add-0n List Canceled.
I'm not qualified enough to post this list. (apparently)
Last edited by Darkmiss on 29.05.2003, 22:19, edited 28 times in total.
CPU- Intel Pentium Core 2 Quad ,2.40GHz
RAM- 2Gb 1066MHz DDR2
Motherboard- Gigabyte P35 DQ6
Video Card- Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS + 640Mb
Hard Drives- 2 SATA Raptor 10000rpm 150GB
OS- Windows Vista Home Premium 32

Phule
Posts: 35
Joined: 23.08.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: Florida

Getting the .bmp to work on the 16k earth

Post #2by Phule » 27.12.2002, 17:31

How would you go aobut making the .bmp work on the 16k earth. I can't get it to work on anything.

P4 2.0
512mb DDR
128MB DDR TI4400
Win XP SP1

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10192
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: NY, USA

Post #3by selden » 27.12.2002, 19:14

Celestia does not understand BMP files.
You have to convert them into JPEG, PNG or DDS
Selden

JackHiggins
Posts: 1034
Joined: 16.12.2002
With us: 21 years 11 months
Location: People's Republic Of Cork, Ireland

Post #4by JackHiggins » 28.12.2002, 19:06

BMP's work perfectly for me for some reason- :D (true color-32 bit only though) I only use them for asteroid and small moon textures though as the file sizes are so large...!! I can't get DDS textures to work & JPEG's work only sometimes...?!

I'm the guy whose computer took 35 minutes to load the big star database though so you'd expect other strange things to happen as well... :oops:

Oya actually as well should bumpmaps work on a TNT2Pro 32MB card?
- Jack Higgins
Jack's Celestia Add-ons
And visit my Celestia Gallery too!

Phule
Posts: 35
Joined: 23.08.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: Florida

Post #5by Phule » 29.12.2002, 10:56

Selden,
Is there anything that can convert them easily. I tried GIMP but it seems a little complicated.

Guest

Post #6by Guest » 08.01.2003, 21:51

DDS files work fine for me on my ATI Radeon 8500DV

Sum0
Posts: 273
Joined: 10.03.2002
With us: 22 years 8 months
Location: Norwich, UK

Post #7by Sum0 » 08.01.2003, 22:08

Bitmaps in Celestia are back-to-front, for some weird reason. JPEGs are much easier and better than BMPs for just about everything.
"I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10192
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: NY, USA

Post #8by selden » 08.01.2003, 22:34

Phule,

I'm CLI oriented myself, so I use nvdxt to convert other formats into DDS. It seems simple enough to me. For example, the command

Code: Select all

nvdxt -file filename.tga -dxt1

creates filename.dds out of filename.tga at the same resolution.
The NetPBM utilities can do similar things with other formats.

Sum0,

Presumably you're writing about separate texture maps that are used with 3ds objects in Celestia. It would be nice if Chris could fix that.
(texture maps used with planetary spheres seem OK)
Selden

Avatar
John Van Vliet
Posts: 2944
Joined: 28.08.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months

nVida tools

Post #9by John Van Vliet » 09.01.2003, 05:54

Has anyone else had problems with using the comand line with win XP
it seems that the comand line is not very saported in XP,Also the
dxt tool v1.0(the german GUI for nvdia ) creats a file on the c drive
C:\\Program (not to be confused with C:\\Program Files). This file called program then trips the CLR,shuts down the tool and gives me a name warning.


The tool only works in my Fox Server directory
C:\\FoxServ\www\ -But it works

Topic author
Darkmiss
Posts: 1059
Joined: 20.08.2002
With us: 22 years 3 months
Location: London, England

Post #10by Darkmiss » 09.01.2003, 22:43

it works fine for me

I have the exe file and a bat file ( nvdxt -file *.tga -dxt5 ) placed in my textures root directory
(you need DXT1a for spec and alpha maps)


then i put the TGA file in there too, the run the bat file
then a dos box comes up and takes about 1 to 5 mins to compile
depending on TGA size.

I have Windows XP pro,
Service pack 1,
512m ram.
CPU- Intel Pentium Core 2 Quad ,2.40GHz

RAM- 2Gb 1066MHz DDR2

Motherboard- Gigabyte P35 DQ6

Video Card- Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS + 640Mb

Hard Drives- 2 SATA Raptor 10000rpm 150GB

OS- Windows Vista Home Premium 32

alegator
Posts: 51
Joined: 29.12.2002
With us: 21 years 10 months

Post #11by alegator » 14.01.2003, 07:59

I downloaded the file cassini.zip from the link:
http://www.bt.homepage.btinternet.co.uk ... assini.zip
and installed the cassini.3ds file in the models folder of Celestia, but I'd appreciate if someone could tell me what lines to add to the solarsys.ssc file in order for celestia to be able to display the spacecraft.
Thanks.
I have Celestia v1.2.5 running on the following machine:
Dell Dimension8200
WinXP Pro/SP1
P4 2.53Ghz 533MhzFSB
2Gb RDRAM PC800
ATI RADEON8500 PRO 128MB videocard
Viewsonic VP230mb 23.1" LCD 1600x1200 native
2 HD 120Gb each

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10192
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: NY, USA

Post #12by selden » 14.01.2003, 18:20

You have to install a .SSC file defining Cassini's trajectory.
Some are at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/spacecraft.html
Change whatever SSC files you use so that they specify "cassini.3ds" instead of "galileo.3ds"
Make sure cassini.ssc is in the extras directory and that cassini.xyz is in the data directory.

Celestia reads all of the ssc files it finds in extras and adds their objects to its internal database. If there are bugs in some of the ssc files, it'll silently ignore those. The new objects defined by the ssc files will be added to the appropriate Navigation/Browser menu items.
Selden

Guest

error in moon texture?

Post #13by Guest » 28.02.2003, 19:21

i just downloaded the moon8k dds texture linked at the top of this topic and installed it by simply changing the 'texture' property in solarsys.ssc (this is correct right? or should i be playing with the bumpmap & bumpheight settings as well??)

it looks great at most distances, however when i get to a certain point a weird ring of corruption shows up around the moon (see below)... is this a problem with the actual texture or is it something in my setup?

Image

any help appreciated


avatar

chris
Site Admin
Posts: 4211
Joined: 28.01.2002
With us: 22 years 9 months
Location: Seattle, Washington, USA

error in moon texture?

Post #14by chris » 28.02.2003, 19:30

Anonymous wrote:i just downloaded the moon8k dds texture linked at the top of this topic and installed it by simply changing the 'texture' property in solarsys.ssc (this is correct right? or should i be playing with the bumpmap & bumpheight settings as well??)

You may want to turn off bump mapping with the 8k texture . . . The bump map is only 1k, and will probably be distracting with such high res base texture. Comment out the bump map by putting a # in front of the BumpMap line.

it looks great at most distances, however when i get to a certain point a weird ring of corruption shows up around the moon (see below)... is this a problem with the actual texture or is it something in my setup?

It sounds like you're running out of texture memory, and the driver is overwriting part of your 8k moon texture. You're probably better off with a 4k texture. It's also possible that getting rid of the bump map will free up just enough texture memory that the problem will go away.

So what graphics card are you using?

--Chris

Guest

Post #15by Guest » 28.02.2003, 22:13

ok i took out the bumpmap as you suggested, although this hasn't affected the problem.

i've updated the image above with one that shows slightly more clearly the way in which the corruption fades in/out at a certain point. it always appears in the same place and only on the moon (not the earth which im also running an 8k texture on)

my basic system specs are thus:

athlon xp 2000
512meg
geforce 4 ti4200 agp8x 128meg


cheers


avatar

avatar
Posts: 1
Joined: 28.02.2003
With us: 21 years 8 months
Location: UK
Contact:

Post #16by avatar » 28.02.2003, 22:30

sorry, forgot to mention i'm running celestia v1.2.5 on windowsXP with directx 9.

jean-michel

I have the same "ring of corruption" issue with earth

Post #17by jean-michel » 02.03.2003, 20:29

I have a similar 'ring of corruption' issue with earth, using an ATI Radeon 8500Le card under xfree 4.2.1 (and 4.2.99.4) running on a GNU/Linux box. A colleague has also run into the same problem with a different radeon card.

This issue does not arise with any other 3d applications, so it might be a quirk with celestia, or a portion of the drivers that celestia excersizes and nothing else does.

jean-michel

I have the same "ring of corruption" issue with earth

Post #18by jean-michel » 02.03.2003, 20:35

I have a similar 'ring of corruption' issue with earth, using an ATI Radeon 8500Le card under xfree 4.2.1 (and 4.2.99.4) running on a GNU/Linux box. A colleague has also run into the same problem with a different radeon card.

This issue does not arise with any other 3d applications, so it might be a quirk with celestia, or a portion of the drivers that celestia excersizes and nothing else does.


Return to “Textures”