Envisat making sharpest ever global Earth map

[Kolano]

ESA plans to oust bluemarble...

Envisat making sharpest ever global Earth map

[BlindedByTheLight]

yeah, and it'll only be 20 terabytes...

[PlutonianEmpire]

Hmm... I wonder if I'll be able to see my house on there...

[Beowulf01]

probaly not unless you have a EALLY big house// it is a 300-metre resolution.....

[julesstoop]

Hmm. Maybe we should call it a terrabyte 8)

[t00fri]

One day perhaps when they apply their full hires imaging, the amount of data gets a problem. For now, the MERIS (medres) imaging spectrometer delivers only 300 m resolution which is not that breathtaking.

Here is a display of the 4k MERIS earth in Celestia. The colors are really strange, despite claims of great "color sophistication"...



Bye Fridger

[Slalomsk8er]

Blue Marble Next Generation I am wating for this a long time

[Don. Edwards]

Ow great,
Now instead of having to make 4 seasonal Earth textures for the Earth I will have to come up with 12. This wil be very cool when they get it done. It will actualy make work on the textures much easier as all the seasonal data will already be there and will not have to added after the fact. It is just going take allot longer to process 12 textures. But I think I will be up to it. If they are going to release at the 500m level that will make the textures 82000x41000. They are sure to be monsters to download. But they will finaly give us the data needed to make true 64k textures of the Earth a reality. Well in VT form at least. Someone is realy going to have to code up a real good VT utility to cut up a texture this big and convert it to .dds. I am not up to the task, I am a graphics artist not a programer.
I think we staill have a year to go at the least before this will be ready. I gues its time to get my 32k textrue parts out and dust them off.

Don. Edwards

[Slalomsk8er]

If I got it right, the land part is finished but the water part is tricky.

Can you write down, what the real good VT utility has to do in detail?

I know the right lib to implement this big picture manipulations
It looks like the celestia source is a bit over my head at the moment, but a VT utility could be the training, that my coding skills need.

[t00fri]

Someone is realy going to have to code up a real good VT utility to cut up a texture this big and convert it to .dds. I am not up to the task, I am a graphics artist not a programer.
I think we staill have a year to go at the least before this will be ready. I gues its time to get my 32k textrue parts out and dust them off.

Don. Edwards

Don,

I don't know what you'd call a "real good VT utility", but my simple virtualtex script has cut many many 32k textures into tiles already with just one command during the last 2 years.
Many people have used it without any problems. You dont' want a "click" menue type of structure for this, do you?

My texconvert code has converted many many tiles very quickly into dds with just one command.

How much experience do you have with cutting >=32k textures? Probably, it's the wrong OS for you, despite running very well under CYGWIN-XP?

The biggest textures virtualtex has cut were 64k. It's such a trivial task really that a shell script is the best and simplest solution, I think. For example, with 3 GB of PC3200 CL2 RAM in my 3.2 GHz machine, virtualtex & texconvert cut and dds-convert tiles this way from 32k textures so fast that time is far to short for an 'in-between' Dim Sam dinner . Too bad ...

Bye Fridger

PS: That's a typical dds VT Mars detail view, prepared quickly and conveniently with my proven combination of 'virtualtex' & 'texconvert' from a 32k Mars texture. Whats "not really good" with this (despite being reduced by a factor 2 to fit in here)??

[Slalomsk8er]

Don,

I don't know what you'd call a "real good VT utility", but my simple virtualtex script has cut many many 32k textures into tiles already with just one command during the last 2 years.
Many people have used it without any problems. You dont' want a "click" menue type of structure for this, do you?

How much experience do you have with cutting >=32k textures? Probably, it's the wrong OS for you, despite running very well under CYGWIN-XP?

The biggest textures virtualtex has cut were 64k. It's such a trivial task really that a shell script is the best and simplest solution, I think. For example, with 3 GB of PC3200 CL2 RAM in my 3.2 GHz machine, virtualtex & texconvert cut and dds-convert tiles this way from 32k textures so fast that time is far to short for an 'in-between' Dim Sam dinner . Too bad ...

Bye Fridger

What lib does it use for the image manipulation?

Let me recommend VIPS ( http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ ).
This way you can work with 500MB RAM 1.0GHz machines on 1GB textures as well

[ElChristou]

... PS: That's a typical dds VT Mars detail view, prepared quickly and conveniently with my proven combination of 'virtualtex' & 'texconvert' from a 32k Mars texture. Whats "not really good" with this (despite being reduced by a factor 2 to fit in here)??

Raaaahhh!!

[t00fri]

Don,

I don't know what you'd call a "real good VT utility", but my simple virtualtex script has cut many many 32k textures into tiles already with just one command during the last 2 years.
Many people have used it without any problems. You dont' want a "click" menue type of structure for this, do you?

How much experience do you have with cutting >=32k textures? Probably, it's the wrong OS for you, despite running very well under CYGWIN-XP?

The biggest textures virtualtex has cut were 64k. It's such a trivial task really that a shell script is the best and simplest solution, I think. For example, with 3 GB of PC3200 CL2 RAM in my 3.2 GHz machine, virtualtex & texconvert cut and dds-convert tiles this way from 32k textures so fast that time is far to short for an 'in-between' Dim Sam dinner . Too bad ...

Bye Fridger

What lib does it use for the image manipulation?

Let me recommend VIPS ( http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ ).
This way you can work with 500MB RAM 1.0GHz machines on 1GB textures as well

DeVIL-CVS with lots of my personal bug fixes notably for DXT encoding along with ImageMagick...

Since long we all know how to cut tiles with virtually NO RAM: use the /netpbm/ tools available on ALL platforms.
It almost takes for ever but it works. In contrast, I am mainly interested in fast performance, since I want to experiment with the result for reasons of optimization and quality improvements! For that reason I installed 3GB of fast RAM on my machine.

Incidentally, long ago when I still used a 500 MB RAM 1.0GHz PIII machine, I worked without problems with 1GHz textures and DevIL...


Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Perhaps it is of interest how I managed to tile and DDS-convert 2.5Gb sized textures with 500 MB of RAM in an Asus CUSL board and a PIII of 1 Ghz.

Under Linux, I set up 3 swap partitions connected via a PRIORITY hierarchy, each with 1 Gb of space.
Chaining several smaller swap partitions is a well-known trick to work with huge managable swaps!

The next point was that my virtualtex tile cutter also works on the console, whence I could save lots of memory by cutting without the X-server running...Next, virtualtex uses the 'convert' tool from a /recent/ ImageMagick package for the cutting, which exploits a quite clever memory cache strategy (if properly configured).

The DeVIL-based conversion of the resulting PNG tiles into DDS happens /after/ the cutting. Hence here memory is not an issue.

With that machine, however, there was plenty of time for an intermediate 'Dim Sam' dinner

Bye Fridger