I've started on a short project to find the best Earth data available and determine the maximum resolution Terragen 2 will allow me to load and render. I'm also incorporating city luminosity that should vary depending on whether the area is in the shadow of the planet. This will depend on some manual setting adjustment unfortunately - it won't just work automatically as you adjust the light position. Initial results are below.
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Note that the clouds seem to cut off at the terminator - I'm not quite sure yet whether this is really what's happening or if it's just the lighting of the atmosphere continuing on above the lower clouds. You can also see the lights of California on the left in shadow. This is before I added the Power Fractal noise and adjusted some other settings. Here are some real Earth images for comparison: http://www.freeimages.co.uk/galleries/space/earth/index.htm Still a little ways to go.
Admittedly it's not a very complicated scene to set up. I have 2 surface layers: 1 for base color, displacement and luminosity, and 1 for water with a specularity mask. The luminosity is driven by an image map and is filtered through a Power Fractal to give it a some fine noise and a better sense of realism (it looks quite soft and artificial otherwise). I am also using a cloud map with 3d volumetric clouds (yes it does make a difference visually for realistic orbit views).
The value here will be in having high quality texture maps pre-selected as the maximum resolution Terragen 2 will currently load (on a system with ~2GB of RAM) and in the fine-tuning of displacement, luminosity, etc. for best results. This "Earth" will be easily reusable in other scenes and will immediately give you nice-looking, realistic results. I'll make these files available when I'm done.
- Oshyan
Sounds like a project I've been working on for a while, except yours is a whole lot better ;). Are the clouds from an image mask or from the shaders in TG2? If the latter, I'll be very interested in seeing the result. Just a little side note, I've been working with 2 223 megapixel image maps in mine on a 1GB machine; how large are yours? Also, are you planning on making this a planetary scale file only or are you going to make it realistic all the way down to ground level? Either way it looks pretty impressive right now, and I can't wait to see the files you end up sharing :).
Yeah I figured others were working on this - in fact I've seen some of the results others have had, but some mentioned problems. So I figured I'd see if I could resolve some of those issues and provide the scene files for others to play with.
The clouds are an image mask downloaded from the 'net. I can't quite get TG2's clouds to achieve that effect, though I've created some decent planetary-scale clouds before with large scales and high warp values.
The images I'm working with vary in size, but the main planet texture is "only" 5400x2700 at this point and you can see it's a little soft in the render I posted (more so at the original 1600x1200 size). I'll be working with the "Blue Marble Next Generation" data to make something higher resolution and see just how big I can make it before TG2 chokes. I'm also experimenting to see whether different image formats - tiff and jpg for example - allow for different resolution images to be loaded. Theoretically they should be roughly the same because jpg will be uncompressed for use in rendering, but theory often proves incorrect. ;)
Making this work from space down to the ground would be really, really hard, at least for real Earth topography. You'd need to use all the available DEM data for the entire Earth - something like 5 terabytes worth. :P I could work on doing it with procedurals, but the results probably wouldn't be all that great. So for now it's focused on just being a from-space scene, as close as low Earth orbit I'd say (still in space but close to the atmosphere).
- Oshyan
Oshyan, A friend at university, has access to military resolution dem/ GIS data, "navy perks" now thats some resolution I think it was a couple Petabytes of data collected over 11 days of shuttle orbit... now that would make some high detailed renders if you had something to run it on ;D ;D
Quote from: king_tiger_666 on March 26, 2007, 02:05:45 AM
Oshyan, A friend at university, has access to military resolution dem/ GIS data, "navy perks" now thats some resolution I think it was a couple Petabytes of data collected over 11 days of shuttle orbit... now that would make some high detailed renders if you had something to run it on ;D ;D
Hehe, wow that sounds awesome. Can you ask him what resolution it actually is? I know there is limited availability of 3m DEM's for small parts of the US. That in itself is frankly amazing detail. I can't imagine much smaller than that - 1m maybe.
The interesting thing about such large data sets is that unless you're rendering at *extremely* high resolution you will seldom see more than a few maximum detail tiles at any given time. So with an efficient level of detail system and multi-resolution data tiles you could actually visualize the entire Earth efficiently on an average computer, provided there was enough storage capacity. Several petabytes is pushing it, but my earlier example of 5tb wouldn't be so bad. 1tb hard drives are about to come out on the market and should be about $500 each initially. So for $2500 plus the base cost of your machine you could have that data set on your system.
TG2 already has a Mars MOLA data loader which operates on tiles and can theoretically load the whole planet. That may be adaptable to loading of tiled DEM data as well, in which case this could become a reality at some point in the future. Obviously most people wouldn't be using the entire data set, but even working with a couple of gigabyte subset of a single state or continent would be pretty awesome. I actually have the entirety of New Zealand at 90 meter resolution kicking around here somewhere...
- Oshyan
I think it was 1 meter, the GIS lecturer wanted to know where he got it, since you can't buy anywhere near the resolution, was the entire world ...
how big are the New Zealand files?,
New Zealand was something like 700MB at 90m, if I recall correctly.
- Oshyan
are they commercial?, or is there a source for free downloads?,,,
They're free, non-commercial. The entire Earth is offered at 90m resolution by the USGS, along with the entire US down to 10m, and 3m in select locations. That's definitely one area where the US government's citizen services excels over many other countries. Other countries that offer free DEM's of their native lands - let alone foreign lands - are few and far between. You can get full access to all the data here: http://seamless.usgs.gov/ There are other methods of accessing it (FTP for example), but that's generally the best tool in my opinion.
- Oshyan
I can't wait to have time to see what you're doing here.
Oshyan, do you know of any dem program that can stitch dems together?. say if I got say the North Island of NZ or a section to make 1 big dem file...
Yes, 3DEM can do this to the limit of your memory and it also exports to .ter, unfortunately it only supports up to 4097x4097 size: http://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html But it is free so that's nice.
Global Mapper is "the" ultimate tool to use for working with DEM data in my opinion - it is extremely powerful, has very broad format support (both import and export), supports .ter up to 16,000x16,000 and is constantly being updated with new features. Unfortunately it's a bit pricey at $279, but it's well worth it if you want to work with DEM's a lot. http://www.globalmapper.com/
- Oshyan
Oshyan, great stuff! I am certain the finished version will be a great success in the community.
cool, I'll be watching this project, very intresting stuff.
Regards,
Will
Quote from: Oshyan on March 26, 2007, 01:46:30 PM
Global Mapper is "the" ultimate tool to use for working with DEM data in my opinion -
...
Unfortunately it's a bit pricey at $279, but it's well worth it if you want to work with DEM's a lot. http://www.globalmapper.com/
I wimped out at version 4 which is cheaper but only does up to 2049 x 2049 TERs. In theory, you can generate multiple TERs and then tile them in TG. We've only got 90m DEMs here (for free) so that still gives me a large tile.
I've contemplated an animation going from space down to ground level by carefully placing TERs of differing resolutions. I've gotten out to a view of SE Asia (Australia, New Guinea, NZ and parts of Indonesia. I haven't tried joining up TERs in the northern hemisphere yet. It will be interesting to try and combine this set of TERs with an image based earth like this.
Have you tried an image masked water surface yet for the ocean?
The water is already masked in this case, although the mask resolution is lower than for the land and may also have *slightly* different contintent shapes as a result. I may have to redo the specular mask.
- Oshyan
Orbiter has 32k x 16k textures and specular maps (and nighttime city maps) for Earth. The images are saved in DDS format apparently, but named as .tex. I think you might be able to extract them somehow, but off the top of my head I can't recall...
I know that Martin (the program author) jazzed up the night light map a bit with some noise because he thought the one he got from NASA/Blue Marble was too granular.
Interesting to hear that Arandil. I'll take a look...
- Oshyan
maybe something like this too?
http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earth.php (http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earth.php)
though to get all 8 levels of one set is over 2gb :( vt/png format though from my experience with using some of these textured they looked pretty good...
oshyan maybe google earth is a good source they have this for mars 3gb tiff at 92,000 x 46,000 pixels
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/753304/an/0/page/0 (http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/753304/an/0/page/0)
now we just need to find a source for earth and see if you can download the raw tiff from somewhere hmm... that's really high quality 4.2gigapixel?
Yes, I'm familiar with many of these sources actually. The problem is TG2 can't load them, at least not on my machine. It choked on a 21600x10800 .jpg, so I'm not going to be trying anything above that. Perhaps if TG2 gains support for dynamic reading and mip-mapping of tiled data sets this would be practical, but for now without a 64 bit version I think not, unfortunately. The point of the project is to do the best we can *at present*, and a big part of that is finding the highest resolution that will render consistently.
- Oshyan
I guess I used the same maps in my evening in europe picture. I also had to scale down to the same res you mentioned because TG2 would crash.
It's interesting because my project uses two 21600*10800 images on a rather pathetic laptop without a problem.
Yeah, except you're on a Mac. Could be that the Mac version handles this stuff better. I'd hate that to be the case, but wouldn't be surprised. ;)
- Oshyan
Heheh... we win again! :D
My 3DS Max doesn't have a problem with those big maps, so is it Windows, or is it TG2?
For those interested, here's the image (http://temp.theglasseye.nl/got/earth.jpg) I made in 3DS.
btw Oshyan, do you have a proper bumpmap for the earth, because I can provide one if you need it.
It would probably be a TG2 problem on Windows not Windows itself. I can load such high resolution maps in other apps as well.
I do have a bump map for Earth but would welcome other sources as well. I honestly wouldn't be bothering with this project since I know others have already done much of this, except - if I may say so - I found my result to be a bit better than any I'd seen previously. ;)
- Oshyan
Hey, pretty nice image of Mother Earth and Mr.Moon!
Quote from: 3DGuy on March 27, 2007, 02:58:29 PM
My 3DS Max doesn't have a problem with those big maps, so is it Windows, or is it TG2?
For those interested, here's the image (http://temp.theglasseye.nl/got/earth.jpg) I made in 3DS.
btw Oshyan, do you have a proper bumpmap for the earth, because I can provide one if you need it.
Hey Oshyan, did you work on the project lately?
concerning the water surface:
I don´t know if it´s an unnecessarily complicated method, but I used a sphere of the planets average diameter "inside" the planet for my green mars. -You know, the one with the terminator problem ;)
That way you can increase or decrease waterlevel by adjusting the waterspheres diameter.
Maybe thats interesting for someone who wants to see what earth would look like after the polar caps melted. ;)
It works quite nicely with the 16k bumpmap of Mars from the celestia motherlode.
Regards,
Jan
Quote from: RealUser on September 14, 2007, 06:49:10 AM
Hey Oshyan, did you work on the project lately?
It seemed like TG2 on Windows was more fundamentally limited in regards to use of high resolution textures than it should be, so I set it aside for a while. I'll definitely come back to it soon though, especially as the new renderer optimizations come into play. :)
- Oshyan
are the render optimizations included in next update????
Some will be, but not the most significant by far (multithreading specifically).
- Oshyan
I apologize for not commenting on your work here, Oshyan. It is cool. I missed this when you initially posted.
Fantastic. I'm gonna sit right her and wait for some updates :P
I think the image size limits will probably change as memory use and other areas of the renderer are optimized so I've got this on the back burner while some renderer changes are made. But I'll definitely return to it. There's a lot of great data out there and we could end up with awesome, photorealistic results.
- Oshyan