Exporting for Celestia

[bdm68]

Hi all,

I would like to know what map types Terragen 2 can export so that these maps can be used in Celestia. My goal is to render a planet in Terragen 2, and then export the needed files so that the same maps can be rendered in Celestia as well. I need to know if Terragen 2 can export surface maps, bump maps andor normal maps, and specular maps. From my limited searches of the documentation, I'm fairly sure Terragen 2 can export surface maps, but I don't know about the other kinds of maps.

I also wish to know what control is available over the dimensions of exported maps. For best results, Celestia requires that these maps have dimensions that are powers of 2, such as 8192x4096.

Celestia supports the usual set of image formats for these maps, such as png. Ideally, these maps also need to be in these formats.

[Matt]

This is something TG2 can't really do yet, unfortunately. Colour textures can be exported by rendering the surface from a suitable viewpoint, but we don't yet have a suitable spherical camera that would render the texture for a whole planet.

We plan to add a spherical camera mode in future, and it will be given options to render planets from "inside out". That would work, but I don't think there's an ideal solution right now.

Matt