No texture map in Itokawa

[Hungry4info]

I don?t understand why we have preliminary maps for asteroids that are flown ONCE,while Prometheus and Epimetheus that received at least half a dozen flybys,don?t have one.We are still restricted to Voyager 2 MAPS!

I would imagine that it's a rather time consuming task to construct maps of irregular bodies.

I would also imagine that there's not a lot of motivation to do it since the Cassini mission is still active (and thus, newer imagery to come in later).

If you're so worried about it, why not take the time to learn how to do it?

[danielj]

But the developers should know where Cassini will go next.I am not sure if there is any close flyby of Prometheus and Epimetheus.But what you say didn?t make much sense since we have a texture for Hyperion called "khyperion2k.jpg" that is almost oficial in Celestia.To clarify,two things:Will it have close flybys planned for this moons and also tiny moons like Telesto,Calypso and Pandora?Second,I barely do some simple image editing.There is no way I can create a map based in raw cartographic bases.The problem is that Phil Stooke is ALMOST THE ONLY ONE working with irregular bodies.Others can do,but not distribute the material...

[John Van Vliet]

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[danielj]

But a UV mapping is made by the probe or by the modeller?
If is the former,Itokawa maps WILL NEVER BE USED, since we will have to wait for ages before another mission to Itokawa!

[John Van Vliet]

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[Fenerit]

Danielj, the UV mapping is applied internally by suited graphic programs, both complete 3D packages or user-defined programming languages scripts as well. If I'm not wrong, the image of Helene is the output of a jam session between me and Volcanopele. Volcanopele sent to me in private form the few up-to-date Cassini images concerning Telesto/Helene's close encounters, together with a table of their orientations in space at epoch. I quicky modelled them with the fully functional "try before buy" version of 3D Coat, an "organic" (voxel) 3D modeler. Such (not free) programs:

ZBrush
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/features/01_UI/
3D Coat
http://www.3d-coat.com/
Mudbox
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=13565063&siteID=123112
Silo
http://www.nevercenter.com/
Modo
http://www.luxology.com/products/
and others,

allows to sculpt and paint the mesh through the use of the stencyl made by images (the Cassini's images in such case) for then got the final texture. Such method could be used also for Itokawa. The only problem is that the best refined mesh of Itokawa is not rendered in a 3D format easy recognizable by the forementioned programs (the CMOD format) because is directly obtained in CMOD format from a dataset of raw scientific data imagery (numbers) processed by a C++ script shipped within the Celestia's SVN trunk, and without to pass through an intermediate files. The only way to do that for Itokawa is using its 3DS version, which is less detailed, though. And like John says, its not an urgent task (at least in my case).
Moreover, such kind of modelling (the 3d "organic") is actually performant, just whether one has lots of images taken at angles altogether, otherwise shadows, reflections and more are disturbing for the real detail of the features and its position on the mesh. So consider Helene and Telesto as "artistic conception near-to-truth".

P.S.
Unfortunately, Sculptris, a FREE 3D sculpt and 3D paint program doesn't use stencyls for the colors, even though it allows normalmap painting and get textures's output.

[danielj]

You say "modeled THEM...".So where is the model and and texture of Telesto?Is it lost?

[Fenerit]

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=14314
Danielj, you had posted in that thread