Hi-Res Textures

[Guest]

Thank you for this wonderful software. I love it.

I noticed that OpenUniverse used to have a package of hi-res textures for some of the planets. My suggestion is for Celestia to offer a similar package. Specially, I would like to see hi-res texture for earth, earth lights and earth clouds. Our planet just looks amazing in Celestia that I always want to zoom in to it a lot. I know this will slow down Celestia a lot, but I wouldn't mind waiting a little for the textures to load. Is this a possibility?

Thank you.

[Mikeydude750]

I agree. Celestia should have a high-resolution texture add-on pack for each non-star object, like planets, or moons. Like a pack of 5 texture maps, maybe even bump-mapped 3D textures at closer zooms.

[chris]

One thing that Celestia doesn't do right now is texture splitting . . . This is necessary if you want to use very large planet textures, because most graphics cards enforce a maximum texture size of 2048x2048 or less. I'm rewriting a lot of the rendering code for the next release of Celestia, and unless I encounter some unforseen difficulties, Celestia will support texture splitting and a high resolution texture pack very soon.

--Chris

[Mikeydude750]

Chris, don't you ever have help with all this stuff?

[hank]

Eventually I'd like to see support for really huge textures, so big that they won't fit in main memory all at once and have to be loaded in pieces as needed based on what part of the planet is currently visible. This would allow decent resolution of the planetary surface from very close up, which is particularly needed for views of earth from the ISS and other satellites in low earth orbit. The textures themselves would be constructed from high-resolution NASA data, such as the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission dataset (30-meter resolution). I'm sure this is way beyond the scope of the current rewrite of the texture handling code, but it's something to think about for the future.

[hank]

NASA now has a very high resolution (43200x21600) color map of the earth's surface available at http://www.visibleearth.nasa.gov.

- Hank

[Guest]

I should have mentioned that the above site also provides somewhat more tractable 8192x4096 earth image maps, including cloud and nightside images.

- Hank

[UncleSpam]

I made a 16384x8192 pixel resolution Mars image from raw data.

Bogdan

[Guest]

Also an anti-aliasing on the edges of the objects would be nice.

Btw: Fantastic program!!!

Be cool!

[mediatiger]

thank you for the NASA link, Hank.
The pics are even free for educational purposes.
Well, I admit I haven't downloaded yet the 650 MB

mediatiger