Jupiter layers

[Joris]

I was looking at this video of jupiter's layers. http://www.solarviews.com/raw/jup/vjupitr2.avi

I'm wondering if it's possible to take two or three bands of jupiter and use it as the cloud texture to make it appear jupiter has moving layers in celestia.

I'd try it myself but I don't know how to make it transparent.

[t00fri]

I was looking at this video of jupiter's layers. http://www.solarviews.com/raw/jup/vjupitr2.avi

I'm wondering if it's possible to take two or three bands of jupiter and use it as the cloud texture to make it appear jupiter has moving layers in celestia.

I'd try it myself but I don't know how to make it transparent.

Yes indeed this is possible. You may even try it out by downloading jupi.zip from my new Website.

It looks great. It's not so hard to do. The easiest start is first to generate a grayscale image from the central 2 or 3 cloud bands. This you do by "select by color..." in GIMP for example. The central bands are white-blue and thus well defined via color. By clicking on the white bands a few times in the "add" mode, you may easily extract the central bands into a separate file. Then you copy the result into the /alpha/ channel of a .png format file. That's about it. You only have to optimize the grayness distribution in order to reach the right amount of semi-transparency of the belts. Of course you know, I am sure, that white in the alpha channel is untransparent and black is totally transparent.

Good Luck

Bye Fridger

[PLN against PNG]

Then you copy the result into the /alpha/ channel of a .png format file. That's about it.

I'm sorry but have you ever try to save a image whith an alpha channel on a .PNG file under photoshop ?
THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE !
I've red a lot of time that PNG supports alpha channel. And I've read the opposite too... where is the truth ?
What can I do ?

Thanx

[t00fri]

Then you copy the result into the /alpha/ channel of a .png format file. That's about it.

I'm sorry but have you ever try to save a image whith an alpha channel on a .PNG file under photoshop ?
THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE ! 8O
I've red a lot of time that PNG supports alpha channel. And I've read the opposite too... where is the truth ?
What can I do ?

Thanx

I do not have Photoshop for good reasons. I only use commercial software if there is no alternative at all. Use GIMP that is excellent and free and exists both for Linux and Windows. Look in the earlier articles and you will find lots of info about how to get and use it...

Bye Fridger

[PLN : OK! Fridger]

I do not have Photoshop for good reasons. I only use commercial software if there is no alternative at all. Use GIMP that is excellent and free and exists both for Linux and Windows. Look in the earlier articles and you will find lots of info about how to get and use it...

Bye Fridger

Ok ! il try it tonight... If you had just quick links to tutorial in "how to make alpha channel etc....", it will be very nice.
I didn't want to use GIMP on XP because I heard about some problems....
Thank you.

PLN will boot on linux

[t00fri]

I do not have Photoshop for good reasons. I only use commercial software if there is no alternative at all. Use GIMP that is excellent and free and exists both for Linux and Windows. Look in the earlier articles and you will find lots of info about how to get and use it...

Bye Fridger

Ok ! il try it tonight... If you had just quick links to tutorial in "how to make alpha channel etc....", it will be very nice.
I didn't want to use GIMP on XP because I heard about some problems....
Thank you.

PLN will boot on linux :wink:

I am not convinced that the reported XP problems are real. I rather believe that the symptoms essentially correspond to "swapping" too big texture files for the available RAM onto the disk! Any further operations are then necessaryly dead slow. Given the available RAM and the length of the texture file it may easily be estimated that often more than 512 MB RAM is needed for smooth and fast operation...(without swapping!)

Bye Fridger

[PLN's RAM]

Given the available RAM and the length of the texture file it may easily be estimated that often more than 512 MB RAM is needed for smooth and fast operation...(without swapping!)

Ok. I got 768 Mo of SDRAM and a GeForce2 64Mo.
Hope it will be ok... I love BBBIIIIGGGG textures

PLN

[t00fri]

Given the available RAM and the length of the texture file it may easily be estimated that often more than 512 MB RAM is needed for smooth and fast operation...(without swapping!)

Ok. I got 768 Mo of SDRAM and a GeForce2 64Mo.
Hope it will be ok... I love BBBIIIIGGGG textures

PLN

...then I predict you will not have problems with GIMP on XP;-). Try it. Try to get hold of the manual with many examples! This gives the fastest start. GIMP is a very powerful and complex package so it will take a small learning effort
initially, but the learning curve should be very steep;-)

Bye Fridger

[D.Edwards]

My problems with Gimp and XP may be my own and you may not have them. But I am tired of everyone saying its because I don't have enough memory or that the textures are to big. I work with 1024x512 almost exclusivly to keep size and memory restaints down and Gimp from time to time can still put my machine into limbo. It did it on my previous machine which was a PIII 733MHz with 256MB of ram and it still happens on my new PIII 1000GHz with 512MB of ram. The main things these machines have in common are the same video card, same hard disk, and same sound card. Everything else is brand new. So then the problem must lie in one of the last three things one would believe. But what does a sound card have to do with Gimp. The video card isn't used for the crunching of the textures. Thats done by the proccesor and the ram and the hard drive. So that leaves my hard drive and its a Seagate Barrcuda 20GB 7200 RPM. More thatn fast enough for this kind of work. So the bottleneck has to be with Gimp itself and the way its using resources on my machine. In my case from time to time it takes all the resources and completly locks me out of my OS and leaves me no choice but the one finger strike of the reset button.
But please by all means download Gimp and try working with it. If you follow the tutorials posted here there thoughout this site you will be making specular textures in no time. That was my initial experiance with Gimp. Then the bad things started happening. I am probably the only one living with this issue do to some strange quirk that my system has. Until I can finaly nail down what that problem is I have to live with it and the posibility of data loss. You probably won't have this problem because you are not working on my machine and you should be happy about that.
Please give Gimp a try.

[Ortolan]

So then the problem must lie in one of the last three things one would believe. But what does a sound card have to do with Gimp. The video card isn't used for the crunching of the textures. Thats done by the proccesor and the ram and the hard drive.

I've had similar problems with lock-ups when I used XP, turned out the video card was in some way incompatible with my system or was just plain flaky (I lean towards the latter). Went through FOUR replacements of the card (same brand, same model) before switching to a different card and the problems went away. I've also heard that the Sound Blaster Live series of cards can cause problems by hogging IRQs or some such thing. If that's what you're using as a sound card then that's another possible reason. The strange thing is my hard drive, which has given me the most cause for concern (almost every time I switch my computer on it makes a loud metallic scraping/crunching noise for a few seconds) has never skipped a beat in over a year since I bought it. Weird...

[D.Edwards]

I do use a SB Live card. But I hardly think its causing the problem when its only one lone program having the problem. As for my video card. Its a GeForce2 MX 200 32MB. Its almost 3 years old but its never given me problems with any programs in the past. If these cards are now acting up but only under Gimp than one must point to Gimp as the problem here and not the hardware. If no other program has any kind of hickup with the hardware, again its something inside the Gimp's code. I will be upgrading my video card by the end of the week and we will see if there is a change or not. I personaly dont expect to see a change in Gimp's behavior but than again who knows. As for my sound card. Its staying in my system until I can get an Audigy. I refuse to use the c**py soundchip built into my motherboard. You have any idea how hard it is now to find a motherboard without a built in soundchip. I hate these things and wish they would just go away. Except for the sound built into the NVidia nForce motherboard chipsets. There a few other chipsets for sound that are used in motherboards that are ok but not many and before anyone asks, yes the built in soundchip is fully disabled in the bios so XP doesn't even see it and again that can't be the problem because the old motherboard didn't have sound built in.

[Rassilon]

Yeah well I have the flakiest video card this side of the Milky Way and I can tell you that I have used GIMP with no problems...though I will admit that XP might be the problem in this case as it IS beta software...All first run software from Microshaft is beta no matter what you have been trained to believe ... And I havent had the 'privaledge' of running gimp under xp...but I can name a few items that will not run under XP...EZ CD Creator 4 or less...Hell I couldnt get 5 platinum to run...Gave me a driver incampatability...windows will unload driver error...when I first intalled it...
Not to mention Stienburg Wave Lab...croaked...3d studio MAX was a bit freaky...but then that could have been attributed to my card...

Though I suspect there is a patch out somewhere...for XP as it needs it the most

D....do a surface scan and defrag...that might help the lag

[D.Edwards]

Hey Ras,
I had the same problem with Roxio's Easy CD Creator under XP with my new DVD/CRW combo drive when I reinstalled XP and all my software. I even tried the original XP patch from Roxio. Then the other day I found that Roxio just released a new update for Easy CD that brings it up to version 5.1 and it seems to have fixed most of my probs. The Direct CD program still nagged about a driver not being compatable but I just told it to shut up about it and everything has been working just great. Even Gimp on this install has been behaving itself for a change. Theres a good posibility that I have some kind of software issue with Gimp becasue as I said its behaving itself and I still don't have all my programs installed. Actualy thats not true. I just installed an ill gotten copy of Photoshop 7 instead of 6 and everything seems cool so far. Maybe theres an issue with Photoshop 6 and Gimp. What do you think the posibility of that is?