Orbiter beta texture issues

[Abloheet]

Me too!

If I get to know where to download elevation data from, I would get working on terrain for Venus, Mercury, etc.

I have already started using tileedit.exe

 

[mariostivala]

Mars as a black hole!!

Hello everyone and Happy New Year! I finally downloaded and extracted all the new Hi-res textures and I tested with Orbiter Beta rev.10 and graphical client D3D9 (for Rev.9). Exceptional Earth and the Moon, but Mars appears as a black hole !! I tried to re-download, install only the Lo-res textures, but nothing changes .. What can I do?

 

[jroly]

Try using some of the previous dx9 beta 2014 clients. The one released on 17th Sept worked for me.

 

[jedidia]

I tested with Orbiter Beta rev.10 and graphical client D3D9 (for Rev.9)

Are you using D3D9 Beta 9? Because then it's a known issue. There's a Beta 10 out, which for some reason isn't on sourceforge, but it's in the dev thread.

 

[DanishOrbinaut]

Could the tiles containing northern Denmark, southern Norway and southern Sweden soon be processed? I would love to have the full Denmark in hi-res, since I only have southern Denmark in hi-res. Would be nice

 

[martins]

It's on my to-do list. It may require a few modifications to my Landsat data-processing scripts, because at higher latitudes not all scenes are available: due to the larger overlaps, some of the paths can be omitted without gaps in the coverage. It shouldn't be a principal problem, just needs some rewriting and testing.

 

[DanishOrbinaut]

It shouldn't be a principal problem, just needs some rewriting and testing.

Thank you Martin, if you need a test person, just give me a wave

 

[NextBigLeap]

HTTP 404 error for 2015 textures on http://www.alteaaerospace.com/users/martins217/orbiter_texturepacks.html

 

[martins]

I've updated the download address in the first post now. Please try again.

 

[jarmonik]

I have been tracking down some texture issues. I am not exactly sure if I have the right set of textures. But there appear to be a night lights texture problem in Japan. Can some confirm that Texture /Earth/Mask/07/02/14.dds doesn't have night lights. However, specular mask seems to be Ok.

The same issue exists in:
07/01/14.dds
07/01/13.dds
07/04/13.dds
etc..

So far, It would seems that night lights are fine on level 8 and above. But many tiles on level 7 and below are not ok.

 

[martins]

Ok, I'll look into those issues.

Speaking of night lights: I am not entirely happy with them anyway, but so far they are my best effort. I constructed them by modulating the global night light image from the NASA visible Earth site (which is low-res and hopelessly overexposed) with the normal Landsat surface textures in order to insert fake high-resolution features.

The trouble is, if I am using the Landsat images at the highest resolution for constructing the night lights, then they appear grey and uniform unless very close up, since all the fine detail is just smeared into dim grey areas. So I am using a medium resolution, which still looks ok from a distance, and not too blocky when close up. But it would be nicer if I could somehow exploit the maximum resolution when in close proximity.

If somebody can think of a good algorithm for generating nice night light textures across all resolution ranges, or (even better) has a higher resolution less overexposed global light map source, I'd like to hear about it.

I guess it also comes down to the question up to which altitude one would still see the night lights with the naked eye. Most night-side photographs will be long-exposure, so don't really give a fair impression. And then we get into all the issues with eye dark adaptation, etc. which are tricky to simulate.

 

[fort]

Hello,

I could say different things about the night lights but the main problem I encountered with my own experimentations in the past is that, at high resolutions, in approach/fly over/land, is the strong flickering they cause.

I was never really convinced, for that reason, of what I was doing. But it could be now easier, at least locally, with the new type of texturing .

It is not easy to soften this effect while keeping enough detail and even stay also with dxt1.

Currently, for some tests I did with the betas, the level 12 of your night textures sounds reasonable. It is, it seems to me, everywhere at a maximum level of 13 except perhaps - I forget - on Canaveral.

 

[jarmonik]

Speaking of night lights: I am not entirely happy with them anyway, but so far they are my best effort. I constructed them by modulating the global night light image from the NASA visible Earth site (which is low-res and hopelessly overexposed) with the normal Landsat surface textures in order to insert fake high-resolution features.

I think orbital rendering of the night lights are good enough but down-sampled textures could be brighter (In my opinion). I am not exactly sure how to properly down-sample an emissive texture. Of course, a resulting pixel can't be brighter than the brightest one of the four source pixels, but the resulting pixel could be brighter than the average value of the source pixels.

What I have observed, the night lights texture anomalies occur in a locations where a level 7 tile has 1-3 level 8 child nodes, if all 4 nodes are present then the problem doesn't occur. (Screen Shot 1)

Low altitude night lights are little problematic like in the screen shot. It could be practical to have some kind of surface base editor that could allow to place structures and light emitters in a surface bases to improve realism. Of course, the light from the emitters would need to be baked into a light-maps and visualized like the runway lights/beacons.

EDIT: Any good aerial night shots from Cape Canaveral ?

I guess it also comes down to the question up to which altitude one would still see the night lights with the naked eye. Most night-side photographs will be long-exposure, so don't really give a fair impression. And then we get into all the issues with eye dark adaptation, etc. which are tricky to simulate.

I suppose a real astronaut could tell us the true intensity of the night lights as seen by a human eye. I suppose someone could try to e-mail.

 

[fort]

Speaking of night lights: I am not entirely happy with them...

If somebody can think of a good algorithm for generating nice night light textures across all resolution ranges...

Below, a quick experiment, made ​​today with one of your dds - of the VAB - at level 16 ( around 5000 m for the altitude ).

Unfortunately , this can only be applied locally and I will appreciate now - after my trys on London - to find global solutions. I search ...at new.

 

[fort]

The tile

 

[Ripley]

...I suppose a real astronaut could tell us the true intensity of the night lights as seen by a human eye. I suppose someone could try to e-mail.

When Paolo Nespoli was aboard the ISS, one FOI member asked him a question and he did reply in a video.
Maybe it's not that difficult to get through...

 

[DaveS]

Below, a quick experiment, made ​​today with one of your dds - of the VAB - at level 16 ( around 5000 m for the altitude ).

Looks good except that the Crawlerway (the road that connects the VAB with the two launch pads) is completely unlit, there's no lights whatsoever. See this timelapse video I created of the STS-118/ISS13A1. rollout:

 

[fort]

Looks good...

Thank you,

But it is not so good; it's just a quick test, to give an overview of what can be maybe eventually done locally. The level "13" nightlight actually looks as better as they can. If I had to publish that scenery officially, I would take more time and care to observe real images to get close better than here. Probably using masks from terrain maps ( roads or others) or things like that.

I did another test on the pad 39 (...I think ), but, again, at first, to reconnect with the softwares that I had not used for several months.

 

[DaveS]

Here's a nice shot of Dubai at night taken by astronaut "Butch" Wilmore: https://twitter.com/NASA_Astronauts/status/561907773449850880

 

[jarmonik]

I made a small night lights experiment with the Beta 11 build a while ago that is mixing the nightlights with the hires-surface textures. It looks reasonable. Now we would need to be able to lit the surface base buildings based on surface illumination beneath them.