News from (8k) Mercury

[t00fri]

Hey all,

after quite a bit of tedious repairing and seemlessly merging the 2 hemispheres
of the 8k Mercury texture (from Mariner 10 mission, 11k), I think I am
now definitely getting 'somewhere'.

-- the 2 hemispheres join seemlessly without any left-over
'pathologies'. All crater shadows are to ONE direction around the
whole planet.

-- all artifacts are eliminated and the texture is of quite good
quality throughout.

-- I also made a nice 8k bump/normal map, using my S-shaped functional
form (!) with the 'in-out level curve' tool that I developed
together with Mario/SG on account of generating the 16bit elevation
maps of Mars from the MOLA raw data.

-- The surface shades are quite subtle and the colors are derived/mapped from
my reference true-color Moon photo (Apollo).

-- Apart from 4k and 8k sizes, I'll also make a 1k Mercury texture, of course..


-- Have a look at the state of the art (all images with 8k normal map):

Bye Fridger

[Darkmiss]

Great work, some nice detail there

[JackHiggins]

Now that is something that's worth waiting ages to download, on a dialup connection!! Looks great!

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Don't suppose you can stick up a picture of the complete Caloris impact basin from your map, could you? Only half of that got imaged by Mariner.

[t00fri]

Don't suppose you can stick up a picture of the complete Caloris impact basin from your map, could you? Only half of that got imaged by Mariner.

My texture is from the Mariner 10 mission and thus lacks roughly the information about one hemisphere.
I have modelled the non-mapped hemisphere of Mercury in terms of the mapped one for people who prefer complete, 'interpreted' textures.

The philosophy is that by means of the '+' key one may toggle an overlay mask eliminating the regions which have not been mapped. For people (like myself) preferring scientific accuracy, the mask restores 'limit of knowledge' textures.

Bye Fridger

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Yes, I realise that - that's why I was curious to see what it looked like. I presume you'd mirrored the half of Caloris that was imaged, so the complete Mercury texture should have the whole basin, right?

[billybob884]

great picture, when will it be available?

[Paul]

A featureless gray surface is scientifically accurate? Interesting... there's much about Mercury's geology I didn't know.

Cheers,
Paul

[selden]

Paul,

Maybe it's more a case of being truthful than of being accurate: it shows we don't know squat about it. You can't be accurate in the absence of knowledge -- you can only imagine what it might be like.

Drawing mountains and craters gives the mistaken impression that we know in detail exactly what's there. We can guess that there probably are mountains and craters (and that Caloris is round ) but we don't know what their sizes and distributions might be. There have been lots of surprises in what we've found elsewhere. Every planet and moon has turned out to be unique, and often not at all like what we expected. Like who would have expected there'd be seasonal summer storms on Neptune???

Don't forget that the mountanous images of Mercury (for example) are still there to admire. It's just that the "limits of knowledge" masks will tell you exactly which ones are imaginary and which ones have been photographed.

[granthutchison, no logon]

There's certainly something interesting on the unmapped side of Mercury - there's a radar-bright patch that is most likely an area of chaotic terrain at the antipodal point of the Caloris impact, but which could be a huge ancient volcano stirred up by the same impact, if it occurred at a time when Mercury still had lava near the surface.
Any guesswork terrain we produce in that area is almost certainly going to be just plain wrong, wrong, wrong - which is why I'm a great fan of the limit-of-knowledge textures to keep us honest.

Grant

[Darkmiss]

Whats the latest info on this Toofri ?
how is it going ?

[t00fri]

Whats the latest info on this Toofri ?
how is it going ?

Well, the 'prototype' Mercury textures (+normal map, +spec) along with /my/ lok mask are done. But producing all of this in standard formats and sizes for the TextureFoundry site and doing the upload is quite time consuming. I am hesitant to go through all this mess, when we are having new ideas about lok masks and textures almost every day. I tend to do my textures as well as I can and then they are supposed to last for a while...;-)

If we decide to include a new Mercury texture into the standard distribution, then I want to have my bigger sized ones exactly matching etc...

Bye Fridger

[granthutchison]

If we decide to include a new Mercury texture into the standard distribution, then I want to have my bigger sized ones exactly matching etc...

I'd certainly vote to have a smaller version of Fridger's texture replace the current Mercury texture, which is ... well ... horrible.

Grant

[JackHiggins]

If we decide to include a new Mercury texture into the standard distribution, then I want to have my bigger sized ones exactly matching etc...

I'd certainly vote to have a smaller version of Fridger's texture replace the current Mercury texture, which is ... well ... horrible.

Grant

Vote No. 1 Fridger's Mercury The word "shocking" truly describes the current standard one...

[chris]

Yes . . . The current Mercury texture should be dumped as soon as possible. Fridger, feel free to check in a 1k version of your texture as the new Mercury for the base Celestia distribution.

--Chris

[t00fri]

Yes . . . The current Mercury texture should be dumped as soon as possible. Fridger, feel free to check in a 1k version of your texture as the new Mercury for the base Celestia distribution.

--Chris

Chris:

unfortunately, the situation is quite frustrating at 1k: the density of well formed craters on the 8k mercury texture is /so high/ that a size reduction to 1k is simply unable to retain a sensible i.e transparent crater structure. The result essentially looks like 'devil's golf course/Death Valley'...

After playing with all the tricks I know (like gaussian blurring the 8k texture, reducing to 1k and sharpening again), I am convinced that 1k is simply not enough to provide an acceptable view of Mercury.

2k is probably /much/ better, but of course I can see the reasons for the inherent size constraints.

Let me know what you think.

Bye Fridger

[ElPelado]

Is the 8k texture available already or not yet????

[t00fri]

Is the 8k texture available already or not yet????

It's not yet on the TextureFoundry, sorry.

Bye Fridger

[ElPelado]

so, when will it be?

[Darkmiss]

Wasn't this suposed to be in the 1.31 p5 relesese
Or is it going in the Full 1.31 release ?