Why is my Blue Marble soiled???

[maxim]

Why for heavens sake is my Blue Marble textures soiled with dirt???

Watching the central east coast of Africa slightly north-east of the lakes area in level 5 resolution, I've found that there are ugly brown dirt dots all over this area. Examining more I've found this dirt on large areas in Australia and South America too. It seems to be that the whole southern hemisphere in level 5 is partly covered with dirt. The northern hemisphere looks quite good althought.

Am I the only one with this problem? Are my textures somehow corrupted?

maxim.

[jestr]

No it is like this in the original.Also you get ugly white spots all over the place as well,I think the white bits are reflections from lakes mostly,but I'm not sure about the brown dirt .Australia has lots of dry or semi dry lake beds .In the read me on the Nasa FTP it says there were a few problem areas which they couldnt fix-central China ,is one of them also the Sahara seems to be to white in places like the contrast was turned up to high-just a guess.I have tried to correct many of these in my 64k texture but I have still missed quite a bit.I guess its difficult to compile something like this and making all the individual pictures to match up,considering that there are going to be clouds all over the place and the light is constantly changing.Also since 1 pixel represents 1km on the ground.How do you represent all the colours in 1 pixel?

[Don. Edwards]

Also if you zoom into the Sahara you will find it made up of a patch work of squares that vary in shadow against the dune fields. It’s very annoying. And its always a very sharply detailed square next to one of lower resolution. I have found the only real way to fix this is to use a blurring tool to smooth the transition from one patch to the next and to generally tone down the appearance of the dunes. It is a compromise but it is better than looking at what at time looks like a checkerboard pattern in the desert. It also appears hear and there in the Arabian peninsula as well. Also some of those white dots are very small clouds sitting on top of hills and mountains. As they often create there own weather. Now the small rectangle and square dots along coastlines. lakes and rivers are an unknown to me. They could be reflections or they could be something else. I try to squash them as best as I can. But there are just too many of them to get them all. We don't want to recreate the texture from the pixel level here so we are going to have to live with a few glitches. It’s either the glitches or a loss of data. I was attempting to clean up the clouds and fog on the coast of Ecuador and decided just to leave the fog and clouds there as I felt some uses might not like the fact that I cloned in data here to make it look better at the cost of being accurate. Maybe I should put it up to a vote. If it goes in the direction of the cleaner version than I many try and clean up other areas as well.

Don. Edwards

[jestr]

I go for cloning anyday,Don.How is it accurate in the first place with so many errors,cheers Jestr

[timcrews]

I agree, I vote for clean.

With these high-res textures, I am almost able to get out of the "this is a program" mindset, and actually imagine that I am viewing something real. Seeing clunky white squares along the Columbia River takes me right out of that fragile state of mind.

Tim

[maxim]

Hi guys,

I'm glad it's not special to my texture files.
On the other hand, there are explanations for that tiling (something you can see also on other textures, like on the topography surface I just released) as of beiing the result of different satellite flightovers. And for the white spots as beiing reflections/clouds. But the brown spots I mentioned just look like the texture layed on the floor when someone stomped into some mud nearby. Or like some organics that began growing on it while it lay around i some dark wet place.

Well, possibly we will never find out. I think at least a soft cleaning would be ok. There could be a 'before/after' announcement per cleaned tile with an adjacent vote 'yes-I-like-it/no-lets-keep-the-old'.

maxim