News from SPACE-GRAPHICS.COM Textures

[t00fri]

Well, the part of my statement concerning OpenSource software is clearly independent of SuSE.

I just said that because SuSE is said to be one of the 'less free' among commercial Linux distributions (they don't use a free licence for their own developments for example).

Well I am actually not aware of much in this direction. For instance, they do a lot of XF86 server development, but you may always download the sources. Also they have shares in sound R&D, same situation here. Clearly they are also involved in definitely commercial business software, but this is separated from the Linux distribution.

But I agree with you, I have very bad feelings to see how the commercial efforts of the major LINUX distributors are /desintegrating/ the Linux community into different mutually incompatible camps! In that sense also the second part of my statement seems correct...
[...]
Developers spend much more time now (hi Christophe) to adapt multi platform code to various LINUX distributions because of this tendency.

I simply hate it but we cannot change it either....

I'm not that pessimistic, sure things are far from perfect but I think things are now converging - maybe because I think that it can't get any worse! X development has more or less stalled for 10 years, then things evolved very fast, it is now time for consolidation and the same thing goes for most components GCC, libc... I think we now have at least 2 years before the next major leap (QT4/KDE4 GTK3?). By the way inclusion of GCC 2.95 in SuSE really is an anachronism.

And who knows, maybe one day the LSB will be comprehensive enough to allow 'standard' RPMS distribution!

I said it once already and it is clearly visible in my lab with thousands of Windows PC's and /a lot/ of SuSE Linux Pc's : Linux is clearly loosing lately against XP. Even among us scientists to some extent. SuSE and all the other distributors have seen much better times. Mandrake went bancrupt...I am convinced that it is this
/antiunification/ of the UNIX idea for commercial reasons that is currently triggering this. Linux itself is better than it ever was. Performance, is certainly not the reason.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

After some intensive work with Mario/SG during the last couple of days, I solved some persistent rendering problems of the flat SG textures in the context of Celestia. The flat textures from Space-Graphics really have some great potential I think, notably if they are combined with the amazing MOLA elevation data !

Here is a taste of what can be seen

a) even with 4k flat textures (Olympus Mons in the morning and evening light, notice the different shadows!)

b) 8k flat texture checking for details in the canyon walls and sandy surface...

The great 16bit/channel 11k sized MOLA elevation data were used throughout after critical alignment with the main color textures!

Bye Fridger

[the guardian]

The pitted look of the texture gives it that 'sand dune' feel. Very nice

[t00fri]

The pitted look of the texture gives it that 'sand dune' feel. Very nice

Hey 'guardian of the Universe';-),

in fact this pitted look is not a planned 'feature' but rather a direct evidence of the 'dots' in the MOLA /bump/ map file that arise from dithering the 16bit/channel data to 8bit!;-)

But I agree, it looks 'real'...

Bye Fridger

[jim]

Hi Fridger;

nice work. I guess it's a 16k dxt1 bump texture ?

Bye Jens

[t00fri]

Hi Fridger;

nice work. I guess it's a 16k dxt1 bump texture ?

Bye Jens

No it is'nt! It's a dithered 16bit/channel 8k sized bump map only. Wait until you see the 16k sized one. It's all directly derived from the new final MOLA data.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Hey all,

it's time to give a little progress report where the hard work with
Mario/Space-Graphics on Mars textures has let us during the last two days and
where we are heading to.

First of all, Mario is an ARTIST! It's great fun working with a real
texture buff like him. If he is not responding immediately, he does
what ITALIAN artists /have/ to do /very/ frequently:

a) Going out with wife and dog for an icecream,
b) going out for a Pizza,
c) swimming in the sea right in front of his house (yes I am envious;-))...

Today the main theme was to get rid of the dither noise that one encounters after conversion of those great 16bit/channel MOLA elevation maps to 8bit, unfortunately the maximum that Celestia can
digest for the time being. Remembering what one does with CCD astro-images, I proposed to stack a number of 8bit dithered textures on top of each other such that the noise averages out. Indeed our mutual experiments show that this works amazingly...

Mario found out efficient tricks of optimizing this stacking procedure...

Finally, below you see a number of Mars images from Mario, just to give you a flavour that meanwhile, we are striving for an entirely new dimension of Mars texture quality...

Bye Fridger

[ElPelado]

will those amazing textures be avilable to download soon?
i just cant wait!!!!!!!!!!

[t00fri]

Hi all,

we are now almost reaching 16bit/channel smoothness with stacking 8bit dithered textures on top of each other! In the image below, 4 are stacked in 'multiply' mode and the last three are screen/darken/screen mode. Mario found out that the latter combination is a very effective 'noise killer'. Notice that one may see now very subtle structures in the sand and the rock walls. Remember this is 'only' 8k stuff.

Compare with the pitted (/noisy/) look of the sand in the similar image above (hi 'guardian';-))!


Bye Fridger