128k Earth virtual texture addon

[jim]

Hi all,

Ready for the next round?

This shot shows the absolute limit of Celestia 1.3.1pre11. The resolution of the used map is 5 meter or Level 13 or 8196k. I used a 4kx4k tile in level 10 to make this shot possible. Hey bh, can you see the waves?

Where is it? Maybe our Australian forum members know this island. It's the Heron Island which is located at the sourthern end of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. On the 32k Earth you will have some problems to find it :


And now the bad news: No, I will not build a addon. The reson is very simple Celestia can not really handle it. Some of the controls works very inaccurate at such a close distance to the surface. I could get only with some tricks the possition for my shot. The problem of inaccurate or jolty controls happens also with a very large zoom.

Bye Jens

[bh]

Jens...terrific! I knew we would see waves eventually...great job.

regards...bh

[marc]

Is this from the same source that you stated before?

This site might have some potential for australia.
http://www.ga.gov.au/

[GeYeR (guest)]

Wow!

If the textures get up to 512k or 1M the next step should be deformation maps, becaus the pic of Hawai already seem so ureal and flat, that it begins to look worse instead of better. perhaps the problem wouldn't be visible with a bumpmap.

Ist there any good Hacker here who could get the results of the stereoscopic Earth scan, a jear ago?

[Mikeydude750]

Wow!

If the textures get up to 512k or 1M the next step should be deformation maps, becaus the pic of Hawai already seem so ureal and flat, that it begins to look worse instead of better. perhaps the problem wouldn't be visible with a bumpmap.

Ist there any good Hacker here who could get the results of the stereoscopic Earth scan, a jear ago?

They're called displacement maps...and only a few consumer graphics cards have the capability to do it in hardware.

[selden]

To elaborate on what MikeyDude wrote, displacement maps are required for supporting DX9. As a result, Nvidia FX 5900, ATI 9800 and Matrox Parhelia-512 cards all support it in hardware. I'm not sure if the FX5200 and FX5600 include it in hardware. Presumably Chris could enlighten us in that regard

However, displacement map support in software supposedly works quite well for DX8 compliant cards. See http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/ for a demo.

added later:
The docs say Xvox was written for GF4 and 9700 cards. It runs at more than 30fps on my system, which I think is more than adequate performance

Just like Celestia, alt-Enter toggles full screen mode. Motion is mouse controlled: move mouse to rotate viewpoint, Left-mouse button goes forward, RMB goes backward. Esc terminates.

System specs:
256MB 500MHz P3, XP Pro sp1
128MB GF4 4200, Det. 45.43

[GeYeR (guest)]

right, thats, what I mean, but as I said, this will be the next step to do, when texture resolution of whole planets reach extreme high resolutions, 64k will work with bumpmap, 128k will look a bit worse with it, and everything higher will look absurdly with Bumpmaps.

but the next steps of resolution will take more time, cause the blue marble texture now is exhausted and the following textures will be many little maps stiched together.

sorry for the bad english

[jim]

Hi all,

I've made some tests with 64k normal map tiles and uncompressed DDS format (u888). The source was 43k 16bit elevation data.
Here are some shots:






Bye Jens