Cloudmap ????

[cartrite]

Hey Don,

That was my first try of actually putting the storm into the texture and I also thought it was a little too big. But if you notice that Isabel is merging with the stormfront over the eastern US that is part of the original cloudmap. If I erased some of the original stormfront, Isabel would probally look smaller.

The reason that I used a 4k is because I think that is the size limit , for my card or a model. I'm not sure if 4k is the size limit for all models or the "graphic's card texture buffer is the size limit for all models. In any case, my card can only use 4k textures on models.

Anyhow, the screenhots at the start of this thread show a seperate model with the storm. That model is actually 9 meshes. 8 for the planet and 1 for the storm. Each mesh can handle a 4k texture so all together the model can draw a 16k. What I did the first time was make the 9th mesh (katrina) too small. The texture for it can be 4k also. I made a larger mesh for it but could not get the clouds to match up (look right). A couple screenshots:




The last shot is basic rendering.

Thats when I tried to put the storm into the cloudlayer.By combinning the layers as you said, with the land, this will make things a little easier. The cloudmap I'm using as a base is the 8k version from the BMNG site. And if you look closely at it you can see the outline of Flordia in it. That's what I used as a guage. What I should do is create a earth texture with a grid on it that displays pixel count and blender units to use as a tool.

But I'm bound by the power's of 2 for my texture size of the storm that I place into the main cloud layer, also due to my older card, if I want to use it as a texture for a 9th mesh. That shot of Isabel is actually 256x256 in the 8k cloudmap. 128x128 is too small. I think I have to scale down the storm a little more and use a 256x256 of it.But I need border clouds to ease the transition from the storm to the base. Confused yet? So am I. I am finding it almost impossible to put into words what I am trying to do.

The base texture of Isabel I used from NASA/NOAA is 250m reoloution, about 5000x6000. Thats scaling down quite a bit.

cartrite

[selden]

cartrite,

4K is the largest available on any card for textures mapped to an individual mesh within a model. If you want higher resolution, you must cut your model into smaller meshs.

Most NVIDIA cards support 4K, but most ATI cards are limited to 2K. Only the Radeon X1800 or higher can use 4K textures. Many other vendors' cards are limited to 1K.

[cartrite]

Hi Selden,

4k is plenty. If I want higher resolutions then 16k, I'll have to divide the models into 32 sections. Until I come up with a better way of dealing with the seams, 8 setions is about all I can handle. My brain is about to meltdown dealing with 8.
cartrite

[cartrite]

I'm not sure how to create a proper normalmap of a cloudmap. Here is a preveiw of a work in progress on Don's 16k_North_summer_clouds. I created this normalmap with the Gimp by decomposing the base texture as RGB and on the blue channel I decreased the brightness and contrast by 100, on the green channel by 50. Composed it as RGB and on the normalmap settings I had a scale factor of 2.5 and the conversion method was Biased RGB. Anyone else have any other methods of doing this? I've tried a number of different ways. This was just one of them.

The model is a simple 8 mesh sphere with no 3D details. Only a platform for a normalmap. About 2 mb in binary.

Some shots of basic rendering vs OGL2.














cartrite

[Don. Edwards]

All I can say is WOW!

To see my cloud texture finally have some depth is incredible.

Keep up the excellent work.


Don. Edwards

[cartrite]

Sorry I couldn't help myself. Just 2 more shots of Katrina.





cartrite

[Cham]

This is very impressive !

Can you describe exactly the addon files structure ? How many files, what type, and what are their size ?

[ANDREA]

Sorry I couldn't help myself. Just 2 more shots of Katrina.
cartrite

Cartrite, I can only say WOW!!!
With all the new improvements coming in Celestia's next 1.5 release, I hope including your one, we'll see a very different Celestia, a truly new one.
Well done to all of you.
Way to go, my friends.

Andrea

[Johaen]

*does his best "Neo whoa" impression*

[abramson]

This technique would be great on Jupiter, wouldn't it?

Excellent work, Cartrite.

Guillermo

[cartrite]

Thanks for the comments all,
Cham wrote:

Can you describe exactly the addon files structure ? How many files, what type, and what are their size ?

There is no one "package" I decided on yet so ....
The files I have in the extras folder are in total kaos. I have an extras folder that has about ten experimental folders, each having a model folder that has about 10 different models and a medres folder that has 10 times that + 1 textures . I was thinking about making Katrina available on the motherlode as a standalone model with an invisible box around it so that would be a model file, texture file, and a ssc file. I'm not sure of the model size in binary because it is presently in a file with 8 other meshes. The file in binary with all the meshes is 13mb. The Katrina mesh is about 30 mb in ASCII cmod format before it is run thru cmodfix. The texture is 2048x2048. I was also thinking of uploading the 8 part sphere model (2mb). So all who have grahics software like the Gimp and Image Magik can do this. All that would be needed are 8 tiles from a 8k cloudmap like the one on the BMNG site and in the case of the Gimp, the normalmap plugin or equilvent software.

Andrea wrote:

With all the new improvements coming in Celestia's next 1.5 release, I hope including your one, we'll see a very different Celestia, a truly new one.
Well done to all of you.

Most of the credit for this should go to Chris for the upgrades to the code in CVS. I've been experimenting with the new code and the posibilities seem endless. Thank You Chris.


Abramson wrote:

This technique would be great on Jupiter, wouldn't it?

That is a great Idea. Can't see why not. I'll have to a look at Jupiter and see. Back when I used to stargaze thru my telescope that was my favorite target.

cartrite

[Toti]

Those clouds look spectacular!

Given the technique you used to create the mesh, probably there are lots of superfluous quads: have you tried Blender's mesh decimator? It should help you reduce the polygon count without altering the quality that much.

[chris]

Based on cartrite's very impressive results, I think I might add a NormalMap field for clouds.

--Chris

[cartrite]

Toti wrote:

Given the technique you used to create the mesh, probably there are lots of superfluous quads: have you tried Blender's mesh decimator? It should help you reduce the polygon count without altering the quality that much.

No I haven't and there is still a lot to Blender that is still a mystery to me. I would not be able to do much at all if it were not for that Z-fold script you wrote. The meshes I created can probally be tweaked but as for the cloud models, my main problem is loading all the textures. Like with Don's 16k_north_summer_clouds I can only load 1 4k base tile and 1 4k normalmap and the rest are all 512's. Even with my 8k cloudmaps I can only load the east or the west hemisphere with full size tiles at a time. Once I tried to load my 64k BMNG VT and with everything else on, Well that brought my computer to it's knees.

Chris wrote:

Based on cartrite's very impressive results, I think I might add a NormalMap field for clouds.

Now that would be really cool. And it probally would be a lot easier on the computer. I don't think many people would be interested in my model method when they saw the frame rates I get.

cartrite

[Malenfant]

All I can say is "wow!".

Though I did like the picture of the HUGE hurricane on page 2

[t00fri]

cartrite,

your cloud images above are certainly very impressive. How does such a setup as you displayed it affect the total performance!?

Bye Fridger

[cartrite]

Hey Fridger,

Here is a list of frame rates
Basic Rendering with folowing options on/off automag = 7.0
stars on, no galaxies or nebulae, and the distance to planet varies.
no clouds with 4k earth and normalmap of earth is about
25 fps distance = 19k-km
16 fps distance = 3k-km
11 fps distance = 425-km

clouds on with 4k earth and 4k normalmap
6-7 fps distance = 425-km
10.5 fps distance = 3k-km
19-23 fps distance = 19k-km

In OGL2 clouds on cloudshadows off with 4k earth and 4k normalmap
6 fps distance = 19k-km
3.5 fps distance = 3k-km
2.5 fps distance = 420-km

In OGL2 clouds on cloudshadows on with 4k earth and 4k normalmap
2.4 fps distance = 420-km
3.4 fps distance = 3k-km
5.2 fps distance = 20k-km

The cloudmap used was 4k, screen resoloution was 1280x1024, and the
Celestia version was CVS 08/27/2006. The model used was a new version
which has only the hurricane Katrina model and an invisible box and a
2kx2k base texture, normalmap, and a 1k specmap.

The screenshots showed above were using a larger model and the fps were a little lower.
Those models used 16 more textures and 8 more meshes minus the invisible box.
Most of those model textures were 512x512 with a 4k texture and normalmap
where the area of interest was. The Katrina mesh used a 2kx2k texture
and normalmap at all times.

cartrite

[Toti]

Cartrite,
Clouds support VT, so Celestia will split the texture sizes "automagically", saving you all this hassle of applying mesh sections manually.

[cartrite]

Toti wrote:

Cartrite,
Clouds support VT, so Celestia will split the texture sizes "automagically", saving you all this hassle of applying mesh sections manually.

This I know. What I'm doing is applying a normalmap to clouds. Currently unsupported. Meshes only support 4k textures and no VT's. By splitting the cloud model into 8 sections I can "fool" the system and at least lode a "virtual" 16k cloud + normalmap in a special area that I want to see. Tile B1 for the eastcoast for example. Hassle? Kind of, but I think thats the only way to do it for now. What got me curious is how a newer advanced card would perform.

cartrite

[Toti]

Sorry, what I meant is that with Chris' probable implementation of normal maps for clouds, there will be no need for large, "static" meshes, and big textures will get the much more efficient treatment of VTs, whilst keeping the 3d feel of clouds that you illustrated. (Of course you'll lost the real 3d of a mesh-based approach)