earth bumps

[Guest]

Thanks for your advice t00fri, I'll try this. It's new to me!

[Guest]

Thanks for your advice t00fri, I'll try this. It's new to me!

Well, there are several reasons why I went along this way of bumpmapping by means of GIMP rather than attaching a separate bumpmap file via solarsys.ssc:

1) Hardware compression of large separate bumpmap files is bad. I am therefore experimenting since a while with Normal maps instead of bumpmaps along with NVIDIA's NormalMap Generator. Let's wait and see...

2) There is still a bug in my Linux version of Celestia when switching on Vertex and Pixel shading in the presence of bumpmap files (Mercury: CTRL P CTRL V => Bingo!)

3) It is easily possible to produce this way hires earth textures that are both bumpmapped /and/ have a specular reflection alpha layer!
(DXT3, of course)

The Gimp method of bumpmapping has the great advantage that the resulting textures are virtually the same size as the standard texture and can be compressed with DXT1c. My bumpmapped 8k earth.dds file is 21MB in size.

Finally, let me emphasize that the resulting quality of the hires textures is substantially better if the /original, lossless/ .tif format from BlueMarble is used rather than some uncompressed *.dds file od some *.jpeg.

Bye Fridger

[Buzz]

Hi Fridger,

Would you share this texture with other Celestia users? There is a repository of add-ons as you probably know: http://bruckner.homelinux.net/addons.html. I'm sure Bruckner will be happy to put it there, and it will make your fellow Celestians (like me) very happy!

[bruckner]

Hi... Fridger and me are already in contact. The problem is: those textures are HUGE! I don't have that much bandwidth (space is not a problem, though). Anyway, I'm willing to try and see what is the result. Meanwhile, there are others who might step in and offer some high-bandwidth resources to mirror those textures! There was such a proposal (ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/textures/) by Smirnov, so you can go there and download some textures (by Pixel).

I'll be away from my computer till Sunday, so don't expect much new in the meantime...

Best regards.

Bruckner

[t00fri]

Hi... Fridger and me are already in contact. The problem is: those textures are HUGE! I don't have that much bandwidth (space is not a problem, though). Anyway, I'm willing to try and see what is the result. Meanwhile, there are others who might step in and offer some high-bandwidth resources to mirror those textures! There was such a proposal (ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/textures/) by Smirnov, so you can go there and download some textures (by Pixel).

I'll be away from my computer till Sunday, so don't expect much new in the meantime...

Best regards.

Bruckner

Which files do you mean now? My new bumpmapped earth8k files have ~ the same length as the "unbumped" ones, i.e. 21MB. What is your bandwidth actually?

A "complete" set of my (bumped) dds textures would be altogether about 200MB. This includes earth8k(4k)-bumped, earthnight8k(2k), earth-clouds8k(2k), moon8k(4k), mars8k(4k) and pluto2k(1k) + jupiter with rotating cloud bands.

Fridger

[Pixel]

Fridger, the mentioned ftp site is quite fast. I was able to upload there for about 80MB/hour. I have uploaded the bumped earth texture in 8K variant. It is named earthAlphaBumped8k.dds. I also uploaded Earth16k.dds and Mars16k.dds which works quite smooth on my GF2Ti 64Mb (20-80 fps). It is worth to mention also that WinZip compreses dds textures additionally by factor of 3-4.
People, the 16K Earth is simple gorgeous, even without specular lighting. I am adicted to it and may never return back to 8K .
It DOESN'T require 128Mb videocard. 64MB video ram plus 256MB system ram are just enough for smooth animation of these (at least on 60USD Geforce2). It seems that AGP texturing is not as bad as usually promised

Best regards,
Pixel.

[t00fri]

Fridger, the mentioned ftp site is quite fast. I was able to upload there for about 80MB/hour. I have uploaded the bumped earth texture in 8K variant. It is named earthAlphaBumped8k.dds. I also uploaded Earth16k.dds and Mars16k.dds which works quite smooth on my GF2Ti 64Mb (20-80 fps). It is worth to mention also that WinZip compreses dds textures additionally by factor of 3-4.
People, the 16K Earth is simple gorgeous, even without specular lighting. I am adicted to it and may never return back to 8K :wink: .
It DOESN'T require 128Mb videocard. 64MB video ram plus 256MB system ram are just enough for smooth animation of these (at least on 60USD Geforce2). It seems that AGP texturing is not as bad as usually promised 8)

Best regards,
Pixel.

Pixel, 80MB/hour is unfortunately very slow for me. For my <200 MB set of dds textures, this would mean low bandwidth for hours during work in my office...We'll see.

A consistent set of textures should exist in the hires/medres/lores dirs in 8k/4k/2k variants.

I am still working on optimizing the GIMP bumpmaps. Note that there is some crucial difference in similarly looking BlueMarble tifs:
One variety has NO ice and NO shallow water colors (cyan), but it is shaded. One should take the one with ice etc and delete a channel mask called "Tif channel" before bumpmapping.

With my 32MB GeForce 2 GTS card 8k textures are the maximum. 64MB makes here all the difference here...

Bye Fridger