Indeed. I increased the brightness of the original (eyeballing, with the histogram), colorized slightly, and F-tooled to png. It's here if you (or anybody) wants to check it. Since it's done with your tools, it won't be uploaded to ML.



Winter fighting back would be an appropriate description . Summer will be sooooo shoooort!

A comon saying is that Bariloche has just two seasons... winter and the railroad (but it's a worldplay because "season" and "station" are the same word in Spanish: "estación").

Thanks for your site-URL. The site is very nice! I have definitely bookmarked it now.

I note, however, that your Tethys texture corresponds to the Feb 2010 release. Anyway, the colors look VERY close to the natural color reference photo. My new texture above is a significant update of the Feb 2010 one. The release was just 2 weeks ago (Nov 30 2010).





Chers,
Fridger

PS:

Another suggestion of how to unify the requirements of brightness and detail is to manipulate the mipmaps of the level 0 tiles! There is a NVIDIA tool that allows to do that conveniently. This way you can slowly brighten the successive mipmap images that would be used by Celestia at larger distance from Tethys. Upon coming close, the rendering would take place via the hires tiles that could be high-contrast like mine above.

I'm not kidding, really! In fact, I'm unable to download the zip. The first time the download hung up at 74 MB, the second at 94MB. I do not what kind of connections you have; probably they slurping all the bandwidth, and I'm unfortunate whether try to download when others, like you, downloading in the same time.

I just downloaded my zip archive again. I got an average speed of 500KB/sec such that the download took about 15 minutes, i.e. the same time as Guillermo from Argentina. The ibiblio server is located in the US and is probably bandwidth limited. My line can downloard 2MB/sec in principle, but typically from far away servers it's a lot slower. So 500 KB/sec seems OK.

Fridger

Another cross check: Downloading the 85k BMNG Earth texture from the NASA mirror
http://mirrors.arsc.edu/nasa/world_big/ ... 200.bin.gz

gives ~ 1MB/sec. Downloading files from CERN/Geneva (~1300km from Hamburg) gives 1.9MB/sec with my line, i.e. very close to the theoretical maximum.

After 2h:30min at 60 Kb/sec, the download is complete... Now I go to sleep, then I'll take a look.

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Nay. It's the November one. I just didn't update the text in the index page, just the zip file...



This is an excellent suggestion!

G

PS: download from CM: 5Mb/s through my 5M ADLS medium quality connection, using 10 threads with DownThemAll.

OK that's what I figured, but I wanted to make sure...



These MIPmap tools are part of the old DDS utilities from NVIDIA (which can still be downloaded from their developers' site). One is called 'detach.exe' and allows to extract the various MIPmap levels from a dds image. The other is called 'stitch.exe' and allows roughly for the opposite by combining individual MIPmaps in the proper manner. With these two tools you may extract, GIMP-modify and then rebind the mipmap textures for the two level0 DDS files.

For simpler such modifications, also the standard DDS tool nvdxt.exe has various relevant commandline options:

• -fadealpha (fade alpha over MIP levels),
• -fadecolor (fade map [color, normal,...] over MIP levels),
• -fadetocolor <hex color> (color to fade to),
• -fadetoalpha <byte> ([0..255] alpha to fade to),
• -fadeamount <int> (percentage to fade of each MIP level).

As a first try, I suggest to just use the cited options in nvdxt.exe.



OK 5 Mbit/sec is ~ 600 KB/sec which roughly matches my effective download speed from CM.

chers,
Fridger

Installed and tested. Beautiful texture, indeed. Do you have also tried for some good normalmap? (suitable hight value).

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Fine...

Unfortunately, the elevation map of Tethys that Dr. Schenk has published, is only available (to me) in a very small size. Too small to be useful. Hence no normalmap for Tethys for now. There is no other option, except guesswork based on "normalmap generators" that has nothing to do with real measurements. Such approaches are not for me.

Fridger

This is fascinating. I hope someday I would also learn the laws of science governing these activities in the universe.

_________________
USB flash drive

Good to read...

Fridger