How About Green Mars!

Don. Edwards · Post #21by **Don. Edwards** » 23.11.2002, 13:43

Thats great to hear. I was wondering if it had something to do with specmap lighting. That was why I mensioned the idea of a mask for the light texture. But if you have it fixed that would be fantastic. Can't wait to try it out so I start reworking my nightside textures.
Thanks for the compliment. I can of course only take partial credit. If it wern't for the great textures from Space-Graphics I wouldn't have been able to do this at all. I hope everyone enjoys them when tommorows download is ready.

Don. Edwards · Post #22by **Don. Edwards** » 23.11.2002, 14:34

Heres another preview.
This is a mosiac of 7 diferent versions of the Terraformed mars texture.
These take you trough the stages of terraforming or the greening of Mars so to speak. There are still a few more to be be made but I think 7 should be fine for now. Have a look.

I still need to make a version with less oceans and ice and fewer clouds.
Then one to go between the first 2 in the picture. I think I will be able to have all seven ready for download tonight.

Mikeydude750 · Post #23by **Mikeydude750** » 24.11.2002, 07:19

Chris, is it possible to, perhaps, make it so that a certain texture would show up at a certain time...because the 7 textures of the terraformed Mars would look sweet with time passing, especially if you could make a few textures for every month. You could see Mars being terraformed like you would see it...

Don. Edwards · Post #24by **Don. Edwards** » 24.11.2002, 09:08

That would e a cool idea. Not only for Mars but think of the Earths seasonal vegitative variation. The textures could be made to show the four seasons. It would require 8 textures for the Earth though. North winter, spring, summer, fall and then south winter, spring summer and fall. I am sure when Chris implements the live reloading capability into Celestia a script could be written for this purpose.
Is this at all posible Chris. We wounldn't want to burden you with to much.

Rassilon · Post #25by **Rassilon** » 24.11.2002, 09:37

Don, You might be able to do something like this with the Beginning and Ending time script...Not quite sure the exact format and all...

Post #26by **selden** » 24.11.2002, 15:56

Right now the Beginning and Ending directives have specific times. They don't repeat automatically, so you'd have to have an SSC file containing a rather long list of them to show cyclic seasonal changes for any extensive period of time. I suspect Chris may have plans to extend the capability, though.

A trivial example of their use is in a ZIP file on my Web site, briefly sequencing through five different "moons".

See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/begend.zip

Don. Edwards · Post #27by **Don. Edwards** » 25.11.2002, 01:34

Ok This isn't really a shot of GreenMars but its part of the series.

I wasn't happy with how white the ice was so I considered the fact that the Martian dust storms would continue for for some time until a water cycle would start. So I created a semi-tranparent layer and gave it a slight salmon color. I then layered this on top of the texture and removed the haze layer over the water. I also added a hight dust layer up in the clouds. This really gave it a nice effect.
I have finished all the textures and I am preparing to upload them. But be ready for a pretty hefty download, 39 megs in all. I anyone can host these let me know. I am going to spred them over 2 iDisks and one of them expires in a week so i anyone can host them please consider it.

Borg Collective · Post #28by **Borg Collective** » 25.11.2002, 13:02

Nice pictures!

Can you make one looking over the CERES (or Deimos and Phobos, even better) with the Mars on its background?

masterhell · Post #29by **masterhell** » 25.11.2002, 18:44

i like that maps!

where can download it?

ps: excuse 4 bad english

Don. Edwards · Post #30by **Don. Edwards** » 25.11.2002, 21:48

Well the textures are finsihed but it looks like apple is having trouble with there server so I can't get the files uploaded until latter tonight or maybe tommorow.

Guest · Post #31by **Guest** » 26.11.2002, 01:48

hi

no deserts for Mars ??

just asking myself, a all green planet seems too unrealist to mee, compared tu the earth... ;p

bye

Don. Edwards · Post #32by **Don. Edwards** » 26.11.2002, 08:59

Mars is farther away from the sun and as such doesn't recieve enough heat or light (about half what Earth gets) to have hot deserts. The climate on a terraformed Mars would be like the climate found in the pacific northwest of the USA and Canada and most of Europe. The humidity would be on average higher than on Earth do to the fact the atmosphere would have to be twice as dence. Twice as dence means twice to three times more humid on average. This would not be a problem for most forms of plant and animal life. Stop and think about deep sea submersibles. They often have an atmospheric presure of 6 to 8 times what it is a the surface of the earth and people have no real problem with it . The best way to discribe what Mars would be like teraformed would be to look at the Moon Endor in Return of the Jedi. That is what temperate rain forests look like. They exist on pacific coast from the redwood forests of California( were they filmed the forest scenes for Return of the Jedi ) all the way up the coast to Alaska and they are also found in New Zealand and there are some on the most southern west coasts of Argentina. There might be a few places right on the equator were sub-tropical forests like the Florida everglades would be found. There would be vast grassy plains in the dryer inland areas like the bread basket region of the USA and Russia and tundra like vergitation in the south arctic and high altitude zones. You can't really compare what Mars and Earth would be like because the Earth has vast oceans and Mars would only have one ocean in the north and a large inland sea to the south. If you moved the Earth to Mars orbit you would see most if not all of the deserts disapear and the tropical rain forest would probably die off in favor of temperate ones. Earth at that distance would be alot colder and dryer. Lets face it Earth would be in an ice age. Earth would be alot harder to try and maintain at that distance than what Mars would be. Remember Mars is a smaller piece of realastate and in thoughs terms it makes it easier to manage. Mars present surface area is about equal to all the land masses of the Earth put together. Now we have to cover part of that, about a 1/3 with water and thats what there would be on Mars. A nice small world to work with. Besides Mars is already a desert right now just of the cold variety.

MasterHeLL · Post #33by **MasterHeLL** » 28.11.2002, 00:02

how about maps?

Post #34by **selden** » 28.11.2002, 01:31

What kind of maps do you mean?
Topograhical maps?
Political Maps?
Maps of today's Mars?
Maps of Green Mars?

A political map of Red/Green/Blue Mars of 2219AD by Franz Blok is available on the Web at http://www.xs4all.nl/~fwb/rgbmars.html

It's available as a simple cylindrical projection, so all that has to be done is to scale it to a power of 2 so it can be used in Celestia.

MasterHeLL · Post #35by **MasterHeLL** » 28.11.2002, 03:12

selden wrote:What kind of maps do you mean?
Topograhical maps?
Political Maps?
Maps of today's Mars?
Maps of Green Mars?

A political map of Red/Green/Blue Mars of 2219AD by Franz Blok is available on the Web at http://www.xs4all.nl/~fwb/rgbmars.html

It's available as a simple cylindrical projection, so all that has to be done is to scale it to a power of 2 so it can be used in Celestia.

maps for celestia

Post #36by **selden** » 28.11.2002, 03:38

Maps are wherever you find them, like the RGB Mars map I mentioned above.

You have to be prepared to convert maps from whatever size or format they come in to what Celestia needs. (A power of two in its dimensions, and either JPEG or PNG -- or DDS if you have an Nvidia card.) A few people have already done these conversions (like Don here) and have made the results on their Celestia support sites. I have a few in my own Gallery pages. (use the WWW button below).

Celestia's need for maps that are a power of 2 in dimension has not been a consideration for most people in the past, so a lot of online maps have other dimensions. Programs that don't have to run in realtime (E.g. POV-Ray) can take as long as they want to convert whatever format they're given to what they use internally.

MasterHeLL · Post #37by **MasterHeLL** » 28.11.2002, 04:33

yes i have nvidia card, what i doing for convert an map jpg or png to dds? :roll:

ps.excuse me again for my bad english

bit bit

Post #38by **selden** » 28.11.2002, 04:59

Nvidia is supposed to have some DDS translation programs on their Web site. I've never used them. I tend to stay with either JPEG or PNG just because so many people do not have Nvidia cards. Also, my understanding is that there are some problems with compression damaging DDS images.

Don. Edwards · Post #39by **Don. Edwards** » 28.11.2002, 09:29

Actualy any video cards that fully supportrs DirectX 8.x should be able to handle .dds files as that is a requirment for claiming DirectX 8.x
compliance. As for any damage or distortion of the files I have been converting most of mine to .dds simply because it makes the textures more portable (smaller). I have yet to see any damaged or distorted .dds file in my work. My only complaint about the conversion proccess is that it takes gobbs of RAM. I probably won't be releasing the Terraformed Mars series in other form than .dds. If I released them in .png format ( I never use .jpg for anything anymore) each one would be 28megs just for the main texture. Then you add the bump and cloud maps you starting to look at close to 45megs per texture. Thats just to big and takes up to much hard drive space and it takes to long to tranfer the files via the net.
And lastly, as far as I can see most of the people using Celestia do use Nvidia GeForce class cards. People using other brands such as ATI, Matrox, S3, 3Dfx and so on.... are definetly the minority as far as I can see by the posts. That might make a got POLL to run. It would give us the average of what cards are being used and how old the average video card is.

Post #40by **selden** » 28.11.2002, 17:13

Don,

I'm glad to hear that you have been having good luck with the DDS textures. I seem to recall a post where someone was complaining about grey blocks appearing in images after they'd been manipulated in various ways. Hopefully that was due to older (buggy) code in the convertor or GL drivers.

I suspect what we're sseing in the kinds of video cards being used is a selection effect. If you're aware that Celestia won't work so well on your present card, then you're going to be unhappy. Most likely either you'll stop running Celestia or you'll replace your card.