Virtual Mars textures

[bond]

Great to see all the detail & well done on the work here but the shadows on the redmars texture are a problem here. Mons Olympus as it moves into evening shadow looks like it's hollowed out of the surface rather than rising above it. Or is it just me that's seeing that?

[jestr]

No your not the only one I noticed this with a lot of the mons's (?),but it only seems to lokk hollow from afar,up close it looks OK I think,your right it probably is the shading on the texture map being constant doesnt fit with the light from the sun obviously at any other perspective,time etc.I should try it with the flat texture+normal map and see what this looks like but the shaded map looks great up close,cheers Jestr

[Guest]

Hi jestr,
Lovely work, but having had my phone tied up most of the weekend, I'm a bit reluctant to re-download to get your latest colour corrected version; is it a difficult job to do what you did to correct it? What's involved?
Incidently, I remember seeing a tv program about early astronauts that were training for the moon landings, being given a lot of exercises to assess the apparent inversion of mountains into hollows, without the normal context and clues from other surroundings it's very difficult to be sure what you're looking at.

regards ziggy

[TERRIER]

OK it's done ,now there is no difference between the two halves,thanks for pointing this out I didnt notice this -I must have been too busy looking at the detail of the craters and canyons.all the best Jestr

Great stuff!, I'm going to have another go at this now.

[jestr]

OK I've made another VTNormal map as that was causing the hollow volcanos-the old normal map was inverted,though when you look at the texture it looks inverted I guess they are meant to be so,and the graphics card inverts it back.It looks sound now though in Celestia.I've also made the size (Kb) smaller of each tile again so it will be easier to download-busy busy 2 complete virtual textures from scratch in one day.Anyhow the size of the zips are now-Texture=20Mb
Normal=16Mb
Heres the link again-
ftp://celestia:addons@81.108.221.84
Best of luck everyone-hope you like 'em,Jestr

[ElPelado]

If you lokk close between 'ma'adim vallis' and 'mangala valles' on Mars you can see a small difference between the colour of east mars and west mars.Its up to you if you want to download again but the jpgs are smaller now in size (Kb)- but the same size (512x512 pixels) and same quality (I think).Jestr

What is the 'maadim valis'? Why that name??
Doesn anybody here know why is it called "maadim"??

[jestr]

I have no idea what a Ma'adim is,but these are just the names of places on Mars,I guess vallis and valles are valleys in english,probably a lot of the names are made up by the people who first spotted them through a telescope.If you want to find these places on mars I suggest you download 'Mars locs' ssc file from here
http://www.shatters.net/~claurel/celestia/files/locations/
and place in extras folder.then you must press 'shift' and '&' when you're at Mars for the locations to appear on the screen.Yours Jestr

[ElPelado]

I asked if someone know what ma'adim means, cause I DO know what it means: its a word on hebrew, it comes from the word "adom", that means RED, so, as you may already know, "ma'adim" its the hebrew name for the planet Mars.
So it seems that there are three "mars valleys": the Valles Marineris, the Ma'adim Vallis and the Marte Vallis.
Marte is the spanish name for Mars, so it seems that we have a valley for each languaje...

[jestr]

If you download the Mars locs ssc you see there are a lot more than three valleys on Mars-thanks for the info very interesting,I wonder when they were named,I guess approx 200 years ago?Maybe Selden can tell us.Jestr

[jamarsa]

Jestr, of course there are more than three valleys in Mars. ElPelado was only pointing at the peculiarity of three valleys with the "same" name, only in three different languages (Marte is also the Roman name of the God of War, so I guess the language could be Latin too). There are a lot of examples of this coincidence in Earth, understandable if you look at all the people living on it...

This reminds me of the curious case of a river in Spain. It is called Rio Guadalquivir, and it cross the southern city of Sevilla. The name actually means 'River the River River' , as different invaders went renaming it:

Original (or perhaps oldest remembered, pre-Roman times): 'quivir', Iberic word for river.
After the First Islamic Jihad (VIII century): Wadi al Quivir, or The Quivir River.
After the Reconquest (by the Castilla/Aragon kingdoms mainly - later spaniards, XV century): Rio Guadalquivir (Guadalquivir River).

Somewhat funny, isn't it?

[granthutchison]

No coincidence that most of the large Martian valleys are named using the word for Mars in various languages: that's the specific IAU policy for these features! (But small valleys are named after rivers.) See here for the IAU naming conventions for various topographic features across the solar system. And see here if you want to chase down which languages have donated their "Mars" word so far.

Grant

[ElPelado]

The level0 normalmap and the other levels(1-4) have different orientations: in level0 mountains are "getting out" of the picture, and in the other levels they look like craters...

[jestr]

Yes it does a little which is odd because all the levels are made from the same original normal map,maybe you could try switching level 2,3,4 with the old normal map.All the best mate,Jestr

[flyswat]

I know, I'm not the brightest bulb in the socket. I'm pretty new to Celestia and haven't figured the whole thing out yet, so any help would be appreciated. I downloaded the files, but now I'm in the dark how to activate them. Where do they go? Should I unzip the zip files? In short, anyone that can give me a detailed instuction list would be my hero for the day.

Thank you a lot.

[selden]

flyswat,

unfortunately, virtual textures aren't trivial.

You should take a look at the thread http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=24404 where I described one way to handle them.

[flyswat]

I think I set it up like the Moon map you refrenced, however all I get of my new Mars is a gray ball. Does one create separte ssc files for "flatmars" and another for "redmars" etc.? Basic instructions are best for me as the spirit is willing but the mind is weak. Howver I am determined to get it working. I have the feeling once I understand this I will have a basic understanding of how this is all supposed to work.
Thank you for any help you can give.
Flyswat

[Guest]

Dear flyswat
Of fairly low wattage myself, energy-saving as I prefer to think, perhaps I can add my 2 cents. Definitely follow the wise Seldens advice first, but if like me, you find it difficult to be arsed to do all the reading you should, then my set up works fine. The gray or white ball is the naked model, so it can't find the picture(s) its supposed to have wrapped around it, so here is the sequence of new and existing folders that are needed for a typical example... First of all-
Celestia(program files)-extras- now create a folder and name it "add-ons"-in this now create a folder and name it "Sol Mars"-then put in here-RedMarsVT.ssc like this if you open it in notepad

Code: Select all

AltSurface "RedMarsVT" "Sol/Mars"
{Texture "RedMars.ctx"
                #BumpMap "Redmars-Normal-8k.dds"
   #BumpHeight 2.5
   #Color [1 0.75 0.7   ]
   #SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   #SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.45
   Radius 3394
    Oblateness 0.006
}


the hash# symbol stops the text following doing anything so you can edit this to include whatever other maps etc later on
and create another new folder-"textures", in this, another new folder-"medres", put in here RedMars.ctx which is this in notepad

Code: Select all

VirtualTexture
{
        ImageDirectory "RedMars"
        BaseSplit 0
        TileSize 512
        TileType "jpg"
}

and the RedMars folder that has the levels folders in it. I know that unzipping sometimes can be a source of confusion, it depends where you unzip it to, there may be a default temp. directory that you can't find and so on. As long as the various files go to the places I've suggested it should work ok, although this isnt the only way to do it. Now if you run Celestia and go to Mars and right click on it you'll get an option RedMars Vt, and voila, da-da etc or else another late night of cursing.... I hope not
regards
Jim

[selden]

Hmm. I just downloaded the RedMars virtual texture and had the same problem.

To fix the problem, I had to recreate my redmars.ctx file from scratch because it had a bad binary character in it.

In other words, another thing to try is to turn on Celestia's "console output": type a ~
On my U.S. keyboard, that's a Shift-`

(On European keyboards, you probably have to follow it by a Space.)

Celestia's "console output" may give you a hint about what Celestia is finding wrong. That's where I saw the "bad character in input stream" message.

[alan_federman]

Selden has been kind enough to make Jestrs textures available, and I have put them up for fast download:


http://exp.arc.nasa.gov/downloads/celestia/extras/



These are the alternate texture files:

>bm_vtex.zip Blue Marble Earth - extract to /extras
>redmarsfolder.zip Jestr's tweaked by Selden - extract to /extras
>redmars_level4.zip (last level for above)

These files have not been tested, and need ssc, txt files to work:

>redmarsnormals_levels0-4.zip Raw files from Jestr
>redmars_levels0-4.zip Raw files from Jestr
>flatmars_levels0-4.zip Raw files from Jestr

[danielj]

I can?t download the textures.It appeared like a page of Windows,maybe because is ftp.Should I use Kazaa to do that?Other thing:I would like a Virtual texture of the entire Mars planet,in 8k or 16 k,to put in Celestia 1.3.1 pre 11.For now,I only have Virtual Textures for Mercury and Moon