Europa texture

Tips for creating and manipulating planet textures for Celestia.
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praesepe
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Europa texture

Post #1by praesepe » 25.11.2002, 22:50

Hi folks :) After finishing Jupiter rings i decided to try to find some new textures for the galilean moons and i am starting with Europa. This texture is made from several photomosaics i found over the net and using copy/paste to join them. For now it looks like this:

Image

Image

I am planning to make ir more clear, adding some kind of bumpmap and why not a specular map to show up the ice reflections :wink:

Comments and suggestions are welcome :P
Greets :P

praesepe

Darkmiss
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Post #2by Darkmiss » 26.11.2002, 02:05

that looks very detailed, and very nice.
Is it a .DDS texture ?
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Post #3by Kingsnake » 26.11.2002, 08:05

Very nice! :D

Don. Edwards
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Post #4by Don. Edwards » 26.11.2002, 09:09

Just a quick note on the bumpmap. Remember that Europa is the flatest surface in the solar system. If Europa were the size of a cue-ball it would be just a smooth or even smoother. So please don't get carried away bumpmapping something the is so very flat to begin with. Europa has no mountain, no valleys, no canyons, no high ridges or escarpments. There are a few sallow craters and the cracks and scarps should only have the slightes sence of depth. Remember think flat.
I am officially a retired member.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.

Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it

Thanks for your understanding.

Guest

Post #5by Guest » 26.11.2002, 21:31

Well here is an update. I've corrected the color because i found it was too brown, now i think it's more realistic (take a look at the picture down, left side). I also applied some filters on it to make more scratchy and sharp and made a little bumpmap to make sense of the cracks and scratches on the surface, I hope you like the results :wink:

Image

Image

Image

Darkmiss: yep, it's a DDS texture

Don: I know there's no mountains or valleys in Europa, the only purpose of a bumpmap on Europa is to make sense of the cracks and scratchs on the icy surface :P

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Post #6by praesepe » 26.11.2002, 21:35

oops! i forgot to login :mrgreen:
Greets :P

praesepe

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Post #7by Darkmiss » 26.11.2002, 22:24

I really Honestly liked the colour of the first pictures.
any chance you have the first one for download ?
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Post #8by billybob884 » 26.11.2002, 23:29

wow! they look great!
Mike M.

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Post #9by praesepe » 28.11.2002, 05:59

Well, I've made a specular map to show reflections on ice (don't know if SpecularPower setting is correct but i think it looks good :P), here are the screenshots:

Image
Image
Image

:Darkmiss
Well i might make two versions of the texture although the first one didn't show the real colour of Europa, i think the second ones are more accurate.
Greets :P

praesepe

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Post #10by t00fri » 28.11.2002, 09:29

praesepe wrote:Well, I've made a specular map to show reflections on ice (don't know if SpecularPower setting is correct but i think it looks good :P), here are the screenshots:

:Darkmiss
Well i might make two versions of the texture although the first one didn't show the real colour of Europa, i think the second ones are more accurate.


Looks really good! You have never mentioned what resolution your texture has?

Bye Fridger

Guest

Post #11by Guest » 28.11.2002, 21:47

8O hey I take it all back...... 8O
Those last pictures look fantastic............ 8O

dont waste your time with two, just hurry up and finish that last one :lol:

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Post #12by Darkmiss » 28.11.2002, 21:49

Oh bugger..... yeah the last post was me.

Mush... mush.... (whipcrack)
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Post #13by praesepe » 01.12.2002, 16:16

I'll continue with the second one then :P I am asking if anybody here knows a fliter that could merge two different textures gradually (some sections of the texture are in different resolution due to diferent missions)

t00fri: no, i didn't mention, it's a 4k DDS texture, although i'd like to do a 8k version but my system hasn't enough ram (512 MB)
Greets :P

praesepe

Guest

europa 4X Download

Post #14by Guest » 09.12.2002, 15:50

Where do we download these beast Europa files?

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Post #15by selden » 09.12.2002, 18:25

Praesepe,

I'm sure the various image editing experts will be able to tell you about plugins for your favorite WYSIWYG image editor, but... I've found the NetPBM toolkit to be quite useful for scripted image manipulations like 180 degree rotations and resolution changes. Although it can be slow, an advantage is that it works a scan-line at a time, so it doesn't need a lot of memory...just a lot of disk space.

NetPBM development is hosted on SourceForge and a Google search should turn up the appropriate version for your platform.

I hope this helps a little.
Selden

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Post #16by praesepe » 10.12.2002, 03:35

The Europa textures are not ready yet, i'm not happy with the results as i've got some parts at different resolution (due to the different missions of the spacecraft that took the images). As soon as i finish it i'll post it for everyone who wants it :wink:

selden: a lot of thanks for the info. i'll give it a try :)
Greets :P

praesepe

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Post #17by ANDREA » 27.12.2003, 14:09

praesepe wrote:The Europa textures are not ready yet, i'm not happy with the results as i've got some parts at different resolution (due to the different missions of the spacecraft that took the images). As soon as i finish it i'll post it for everyone who wants it :wink:
selden: a lot of thanks for the info. i'll give it a try :)


Hello Praesepe, Happy New Year first of all. :P
Then, I'm using your very nice (and correct as zero meridian) images of Io, Ganimede and Callisto, but we are still missing the wonderful Europa texture and specular map that you showed us more than one year ago.
Have you got finished it? :)
If not, why don't you make available the one you showed? :wink:
It's the best one, even if still to be completed.
Please! :wink:
Thanks a lot

:D Andrea :D
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dsroy

Europa

Post #18by dsroy » 29.12.2003, 07:22

It looks like you found the same USGS Europa base map I fought for a while. Wise move not showing the longitudinal strips of high-res mapping (which fall just to the East of displayed section).

The best solution I found (so far) was to simply use a gausian blur to 'down-sample' the high-res material to the 'medium-resolution' of most of the map (which is still superior to Voyager era imagery), scale down to 4k, and then apply a reduce contrast filter to sections that were stilll glaringly ugly. At a distance, it was okay, but close up it was still very ugly.

The big problem, is that unlike Clementine or Mars orbiter mosaics,
the high-res images for Europa come from Galileo passes at rather different altitudes and illumination angles. Some of the high-res segments were illuminated at a low angle which makes them look far 'bumpier' than the rest, and I think this was exacerbated by some image processing done by the USGS. Definitely not made with computer rendering in mind.

I'd note also that your rendition has far more contrast between the ice plains and reddish soot than I've seen in either Voyager or Galileo full-color image. Judging from how much the color calibration changed between Voyager and Galileo (eg, see the old bronze vs. the new bright yellow Io), I believe all Voyager color composites should be viewed as suspect, and are at the very least oversaturated on the red filter.

That said, I like the following image of Europa from a purely aesthetic standpoint, and used it to guide my own coloration decisions:

http://www.solarviews.com/raw/jup/europa1.gif

Others are even less red. Perhaps most telling are the color images of Europa passing before Jupiter's disk. Regardless of how saturated the Jupiter coloration in the color composite, Europa, even its dark hemisphere, is lighter and less saturated in color.

Some other considerations: the reddish 'soot' doesn't always follow the 'cracks', and in some high-resolution images actually appears as though someone sprinkled powder roughly, but not exactly, along the path of the surface 'cracks'. So just colorizing based on the monochrome image isn't correct. The dark 'cracks' aren't even neccessarily the largest or most recent, just the ones that coincided with a historical episode when the crack formation coincided with some outgassing. Or so it seems from the detail.

The darker 'cracks' don't correspond to canyons, in fact from oblique illumination images the surface is a very chaotic patchwork of very slight ridgelines from multiple episodes of cracking and reannealing, at different overlapping angles. The dark 'cracks' aren't even neccessarily the largest or most recent, just the ones that coincided with a historical episode when the crack formation coincided with some outgassing. Or so it seems from the detail. Any bumpmapping based on albedo features seen at the level of the medium resolution material of most of the USGS map is fairly deceptive.

As an aside, some of the Photoshop/mosaic work of Michael Benson in his book "Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes" is very, very impressive. A reasonably priced coffee table book that has some more unusual selections from the JPL archives. Some filler, but the high-res hemispheric mosaic of a Martian dust-storm is alone nearly worth the admission.

Anyway, I'll post my 4/8k Europa when I get back from break on 1/2 or so. I still prefer John Van Vliet's Europa, for even though it pales a bit in color accuracy and resolution, it is free from the glaring rectilinear patches of high-resolution/low-illumination angle patches of the USGS map. One solution I've considered is to substitute the Voyager era material for these patches, but suspect the problem would simply be shifted around. Perhaps in 2010 after the JIMO mission we'll get the Europa we want.

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Post #19by Evil Dr Ganymede » 03.01.2004, 08:16

Go easy on the specular reflection. In fact, ditch it altogether - Europa doesn't look like that - its surface isn't smooth, shiny, reflective ice; it's smushed up, regolithy ice crystals.

But it certainly has no coherent specular reflection component like what you show in your images - neither do any other icy satellites.


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