Blue Marble Source Files

[diabloblanco17]

I recently downloaded a couple of files from the Blue Marble ftp site, and I haven't been able to do anything with them because of the file extension. It reads "Earth21600W.3x21600x21600," and I assume that this means it is in some sort of raw data format. How would I go about opening the file with Photoshop? Thanks.

[Don. Edwards]

Those should be in the tiff format. Besides converting them to eaither .jpg, .png, or DDS you need to resize them to a power of 2 size. The nearest is 16384x16384. You should have both an east and a west texture halves. You will need to put them together as well. To save yourself time in this just search trough the forum. There are links here and there for textures already made of these files, namely walton's very nice virtual texture. I myself am working on a 32K texture that takes what BlueMarble started with and fixing some of their coloring issues to bring a more realistic texture for everyone. but by all means if you wish to join the few of us tackling these beasts please be my guest.

Don. Edwards

[Paul]

They may not be TIFF. I downloaded a version of the files from the FTP site that were in a RAW format. Photoshop will still open them, however it must be done with the "Open As..." command, and choose the format 24 bits (3 bytes) per pixel with no header bytes. However, you will need a large amount of memory and scratch drive space and it will take a long time. I ended up having to write a script that split them up into smaller blocks.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Paul

[diabloblanco17]

Sweetness. Thanks a lot for the help. I really should've been able to figure out that one for myself, seeing as I tried the "Open As" function before. I just didn't see the .RAW format in the list. *slaps forehead*

I'll post some of the stuff I make with it later.