Blue Marble Oct. 500m

[cartrite]

After going thru many methods of maddness, dead ends, and etc. I think I found a method of really doing this. I'll find out when I try to do file A1. Here is a look at B1. Still needs work but





















I may be able to get the western half done by next week. That is if I don't hit any more dead ends.

The main problem I had so far was eastern northern Canada. A lot of the land is the same color as the ocean. When I lighten the ocean, it changes the land too. I'm working on the October files so mabey the reason they are so dark is the sun angle at this time of year. I have not seen the spring or summer files so ????????????

But it can be done. I have an old AMD K7 900 mhz with only 512 mb of ram. I split the files into 5400x5400 and work on them. 16 files per block.
8 blocks. Thats 128 5400x5400 files. I need a beer.

cartrite

[cartrite]

This may be a big waste of time, coloring the oceans that is.
I got a1 done. That's almost the western half. I used some of Don Edwards scc file settings and some of my own. The clouds are the 32k vt by Harald Schmidt from the motherlode. Atmosphere and cloud height is way up. Haze setting is also a little higher. One shot is an actual tile from some level.









The reason I said that this may be a waste of time is this.
Here are some shots from the untouched files in thier original form.
They were only scaled down to work with Celestia. With the Gl-vertex/Nvidia Combiners rendering mode the nearly black oceans brighten near the edges. As I think some of you have said this is what the earth looks like from space. With all other rendering modes the oceans are quite dark. I also included a shot that shows the dark coastal waters.
This can be fixed quite easily by using the bathametry files for the same month. Or others? I downloaded the World and Bath sets for Oct.
The last shot shows what it looks like without GLvertex/NvidiaCombiners.











What do you all think

cartrite

[jestr]

Hi Cartrite,I have also,been playing with these textures,and agree the oceans are very dark,especially around the coastlines in places.I think they need lightening a touch,also the greens are too saturated and bright,comparing it to the Messenger video/photos where the green forests/jungles are pretty dark.


http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/images/flyby_images/twins_lg.jpg
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/images/flyby_images/galapagos_lg.jpg
From the second of these it seems obvious that the specular colour definition needs changing.I have it set now to these values
SpecularColor [ 0.85 0.75 0.55 ]
SpecularPower 35.0
Also I have changed the haze settings to these
HazeColor [ 0.43 0.62 0.95 ]
HazeDensity 0.35

The colour is similar to the values for the lower atmosphere,and can help to make the oceans bluer (and everything else) around the edges .All the best,Jestr

[cartrite]

The dark coastal waters can be eliminated using the bath files. What I do is select the bright blue coastal section using the gimp's "select by color threshold 14", copy then paste onto the corresponding world file. Then before I anchor it, bucket fill 100% opacity normal mode, with color 020514 (hex). That gets rid of 99% of the problem. Then you can lighten the oceans however you please.

I've been saving those files in the process and may stop there and try using the ssc file to brighten the ocean. Coloring the whole ocean is proving to be a llllllllllllllllot of work. Too much for my poor computer (and my feeble mind). I don't know. Maybe I'll keep going.

cartrite

[cartrite]

Jestr,

I guess those images that you posted are the real thing?

Here is my ssc file.

AltSurface "BlueMarble-NextGen" "Sol/Earth"
{
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
Texture "BlueMarble.ctx"
SpecularTexture "earth-spec.png"
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.51 ]
SpecularPower 35.0

HazeColor [ 0.50 0.7 2.0 ]
HazeDensity 0.40


Atmosphere {
Height 275
Lower [ 0.43 0.52 0.65 ]
Upper [ 0.26 0.47 0.84 ]
Sky [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
Sunset [ 1.0 0.6 0.2 ]
# Sunset [ 0.3 1.0 0.5 ]
CloudHeight 190
CloudSpeed 00 }
}

I think I'll try playing around with these settings some more. Thanks for sharing what you got. I'm going to try those too. I'm going to try them on the original unchanged texture and if I find something I like, I'll use the files I saved after getting rid of the dark coastal waters.

Thanks Again,

cartrite

[jestr]

Well real thing might be hard to pin down,browsing through astronauts photos of Earth and many other images,there seems to be quite a variety of colour schemes.Also bear in mind that the cloud map can change the appearance quite a bit as Don Edwards has pointed out,some of his cloud textures have a light blue tint which helps to make it look "right" but then when you use a different cloud map it looks "wrong".Just thought I'd point this out,although Haralds 32k clouds have no colouring that I'm aware of,cheers Jestr