"Yet Another New Earth Cloud Map Texture, This Time 4K"

[Nameless]

Well there not working. it obviously cant be done.
You seem to be able to share only with people whos yahoo id you specify.
So the only person that can acces them is Buzz who was interested in my original clouds( these are new and improved).

Link is http://uk.briefcase.yahoo.com/dbrady247

I think you'll probably have to sign in or something i'm not sure. Their in the celestia folder.

If anyone else has a yahoo id and wants them let me know.

Fridger-Pog mo hon!

[Nmaeless]

You can try it too johnvanvliet too. remember you have to be signed in.

[jim]

. . . Or you could have a second map, but that does require more memory . . .

Chris, i'm suprised. I didn't know that you'd included this feature in Celestia. Please give me an example which lines i have to add in the solar.sys to get a second cloud layer.

Thanks
Jens

[Rassilon]

Well there not working. it obviously cant be done.
You seem to be able to share only with people whos yahoo id you specify.
So the only person that can acces them is Buzz who was interested in my original clouds( these are new and improved).

Link is http://uk.briefcase.yahoo.com/dbrady247

I think you'll probably have to sign in or something i'm not sure. Their in the celestia folder.

If anyone else has a yahoo id and wants them let me know.

Fridger-Pog mo hon!

Yahoo doesnt generally allow remote linking...most sites wont unless you pay membership fees...Someday my server will return to allow peeps to upload to a public server for celestia...the thing is Im lacking the funds for a 'secure' venture into this...

[chris]

. . . Or you could have a second map, but that does require more memory . . .

Chris, i'm suprised. I didn't know that you'd included this feature in Celestia. Please give me an example which lines i have to add in the solar.sys to get a second cloud layer.

Thanks
Jens

Sorry . . . By a second map I meant a bump map in addition to an opacity/color map. Multiple cloud layers will appear in a future version of Celestia, probably 1.3.1.

--Chris

[Don. Edwards]

Wow, I go away to work for a few hours and look what happens here.
Jango Fett, I do have a very futuristic outlook for video cards. But, I must say I am very dissapointed that NVidia isn't offering a version of the GeForce FX with at least 256mb of VRAM. Looks like they are capping it at 128mb. I bet we see a blasted ATI Radeon 9800 with that option when it becomes available in the next few months. And Matrox already offers a card with 256mb of memory. As for AGP 8x and 16x, who cares. The AGP bus has really and truely never gave what it promised. The AGP bus is a dead end an Intel new that when they hoisted the thing on us years ago. The future bus for video is PCI Express. Its bandwith is going to blow away the AGP bus no matter how many times it getts multiplied. PCI Express is even more like the VESA Local Bus video cards of the past. They were always faster than PCI because they had a direct conection to the CPU. Of course this was long before true 3D came to the humble PC.
And anyway I was speaking of things at this pressent time of technology not the future. I was also being considerate of your plight with your GeForce2 being your bottleneck with Celestia. True the future holds some vary incredible products but we are in the here and now and this is what it takes to get things to work for you.
And nameless, I was stating that you did something cutting edge or pioneering as Chris has had square textures in Celestia from the begining.
I was simply repeating your own words. You aid you were using 2k x 2k cloud maps and thought you discovered something special about using them. I guess we got our information crossed somewhere.
Well I don't know if this is going to post because my cable modem the 2 days has been acting very screwy and the forum is crawling like a snail.

[Jango Fett]

With all respect and unbiased naivity, but this looks like "plastified whipped cream". I am sure you understand what I mean...

Somebody once told me that it is not all that easy to bumpmap clouds;-)

Bye Fridger

Yes, it looks like it, but it's very close to the real look of cloud layer seen from orbit. Take a look at some pictures on the Net... They look very solid though, like they are not made of gas, I think they have to be more blurred to achieve correct look.

Anyway, I still thnik bump mapping the clouds is very important for realism. I still have to watch flat layer above perfectly bumpmapped surface...


Don, if you have a good vision on future of graphic cards, why do you metion like it's a problem for upcoming versions of Celestia?

I have one questio, maybe it's silly, but I don't know anything of programming, but why celestia doesn't work on Direct3D and doesn't use the benefits of other graphic chipsets other than nVidia's?

[Jango Fett]

P.S. Don, you were right about distorsions on my screenshot. The reason is .jpeg format of bumpmap, which now affects the clouds. When I zoomed jpeg I saw those squares... I'm gonna use tga...

[Guest]

Off topic but the info is what I spoke of earlier in this thread. Here is some info on the PCI Express bus.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8000

[t00fri]

Anyway, I still thnik bump mapping the clouds is very important for realism. I still have to watch flat layer above perfectly bumpmapped surface...

Of course, bumpmapping is crucial. I think I actually was the first to experiment with bumpmapped clouds quite a while ago;-). Many used and still use my 2k bumpmapped clouds...I still use them because I am convinced they are still the best;-).

Bye Fridger

[Jango Fett]

I made new bump effect on Don's 2kx2k resized cloud map (for those who can't enjoy 4k because they don't have GF3 or GF4) (thanks Don) with Corel PHOTO-PAINT 11. New version of Corel has great posibilities of bumpmapping...

[Don. Edwards]

Hey and they don't look mountains. I will have to check into Photo-Paint 11. I am sure there is probbly a filter or plugin for Photoshop that can do bumpmaping as well. Its just finding it and how much it will cost. I do hate the idea of trying to learn yet another image editing program. I just got really comforatble with GIMP. Oh well maybe time for something new agian. I can never learn to much. Even at my age my mind is still like a spung.

[jim]

Bye Jens

I am sure there is probbly a filter or plugin for Photoshop that can do bumpmaping as well. Its just finding it and how much it will cost.

Hi Don, there is no special filter or plugin necessary. For bumpmapping effect use the relief filter. The way is simple. Build two layers the first with the texture the second with the bumpmap (a gray scale high field map). Apply the relief filter to the bumpmap. Then change the fill method of the first (upper) layer to "copy together". Thats all the texure looks now bumpmapped.

Bumpmapping of clouds is a little bit difficult because a white texture can't get brighter and so you get only shadows and not the full bumpmapping effect. Another problem is that the transparency removes partly the effect.

Good luck with bumpmapping

Jens

[Jango Fett]

Hey and they don't look mountains. I will have to check into Photo-Paint 11. I am sure there is probbly a filter or plugin for Photoshop that can do bumpmaping as well. Its just finding it and how much it will cost. I do hate the idea of trying to learn yet another image editing program. I just got really comforatble with GIMP. Oh well maybe time for something new agian. I can never learn to much. Even at my age my mind is still like a spung.

I'm allways using PhotoPaint, I personally think it's better than Photoshop (although my colleagues from graphic design section on my faculty are convincing me that there is no better image-editing program than Photoshop). I used Photoshop only because of DDS plugin. PhotoPaint is much faster and easy to use, and also has great possibilities.

I never used GIMP. Actually, I've heard for GIMP when I joined this forum..., I don't know how to install it, and I also don't know wtf is GTK...

Bumpmap feature is implemented in latest version of PhotoPaint (11), you can easily bump the image using pre-created bump-map, or PhotoPaint automatically calculates how it should look like without loading any maps (and offers some parameters, like inverting, smoothness, light direction etc), and it works great (clouds from image above are made automaticaly by this method)!

[nameless]

Did Someone steamroll over Fridgers perfect clouds when he wasnt looking?




This is an outrage. What kind of maniacle mind could contrive of such a plan? We must find him/her and smite them down like they have never been smitten before!
In the meantime i hope to put my clouds on rassilons site at some stage (If he's willing) so we can all have great clouds once again.



I must also find the person who put all the blue &%!@ at the bottom of my picture. Grrrr

[Don. Edwards]

Ah, you did what I did an brought all those little hidden clouds out into the open to make everything more realistic. Good job. One little thing though. You have apparently made the booboo I did. The shadows are now just a little to dark. When you apply the drop shadow effect make it more transparent and adjust its color away from black to a dark grey. I think you will see that will take you closer to what I did in my last cloudmap work. The one I can't seem to replicate.
Maybe you can replicate what I did so I can stop trying. I have too many things going on at once anyway.
1. Seasonal Cloudmaps for Earth and Terraformed Mars
2. Updated Terraformed Mars textures at 8k.
3. Continued work on my Earth texture and the successful creation of 16k version.
4. My new seasonal Earth textures.
5. Seasonal Terraformed Mars textures.

[jim]

Hi nameless (bh?),

Your cloud map is very impressing. Now i had to improve my own 2kx2k clouds.



I think i'm not far away with my "lowres" cloud map.

Bye Jens

[Nameless]

Cheers Jim. I'm glad someone likes it!
Your clouds look great for a 2k map although your blue tint seems a bit green-that'd be my only gripe.

bh who?

[bh]

bh...who he?

[jim]

Hi all,

Now i think i got it. Here are the shots.



This from a larger distance:



and finaly vere close:



Very important my adjustments in v1.2.5 :
- pixel and vertex shader on
- NO ambient light!
- HazeColor [ 0.3 0.6 0.8 ], HazeDensity 1
- no night lights, i foregot it
- 16K earth, 8K normal map, 4K specular map

I will upload my "earth_cloud_2x2k.dds" at Celestial Visions.

Bye Jens

p.s. Sorry Nameless i saw the picture bug and remembered me that bh had a similar problem.