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Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby GinGin » Thu Nov 21, 2019 10:06 am

Ah Nice it is a torrent link now .
The direct links have been removed ?
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby chris_blues » Thu Nov 21, 2019 12:10 pm

wkitty42 wrote in Thu Nov 21, 2019 3:21 am:isn't the hires stuff also in one of the FGAddon addon directories? i know it isn't an actual addon you can select and the sim will use but that's another method of getting it, isn't it?

Yes you're right, I forgot about it. Though 16k textures are not in there. These are only available via the torrent.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby GinGin » Thu Nov 21, 2019 6:56 pm

I would like to try to compil 32 k dds textures. Are Gpu like gtx 1080 able to handle it ?
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Thu Nov 21, 2019 7:10 pm

I would like to try to compil 32 k dds textures. Are Gpu like gtx 1080 able to handle it ?


Probably - but you need input image data from somewhere... Pale Blue Marble doesn't have that much.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby chris_blues » Thu Nov 21, 2019 8:00 pm

Thorsten wrote in Thu Nov 21, 2019 7:10 pm:
GinGin wrote in Thu Nov 21, 2019 6:56 pm:I would like to try to compil 32 k dds textures. Are Gpu like gtx 1080 able to handle it ?


Probably - but you need input image data from somewhere... Pale Blue Marble doesn't have that much.


Well, 8k textures just (barely) fit into my 1GB graphics RAM. 16k probably need 4 times that. So 32k would need about 4 times of the 16k textures.

And yes, The NASA data only offers imagery between 8k and 16k. So 16k is already oversampled. 32k would probably look almost the same as 16k...
(btw, the resolutions we're talking about are actually measured in hemisphere's quarters. 4 tiles on the northern hemisphere and 4 on the southern. So the overall equator length in 8k (8192px) has 32768px). But I certainly can understand the desire to keep on pushing these numbers. Maybe in the meantime, somewhere in the depth of the internet, some better data has come up... I'd be happy to update the converter script if someone finds better data...
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby eatdirt » Thu Nov 21, 2019 11:25 pm

Hi there,
16K textures are already very very heavy for a 1080GTX, as soon as the view changes from a region to another one, I am getting tens of seconds screen freezes.

The best option I've found for that card is to use 8K png textures for clouds, heights and normalmap; and 16K dds for earth textures. At that resolution, you'll see that the NASA maps have actually a lot of artefacts already.

It would be nice to get some raw satellite data and do our own maps, but these days, these data are not easily made public :(

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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Fri Nov 22, 2019 7:20 am

One could of course sub-divide the planet further - for low orbits, you'd get to see less memory occupancy because you probably never have more than four tiles in memory at once.

The main reason that isn't done is my utter lack of 3d modeling skills - I had no idea how that would have to be arranged.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby chris_blues » Sun Nov 24, 2019 1:47 pm

Re-reading the last conversation...

[off-topic]
Gomendio wrote in Wed Nov 20, 2019 8:47 pm:[...] [U]nable to discern the boundaries from the countries on Orbit. Very dull experience[...]


Funny point! Well that's just how mother earth looks like from space. There are no borders or nations. It's just earth... Amazing how nature always reminds us (that is, if you're willing to see) of how insignificant humans and their crazy ideas actually are...
[/off-topic]
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby chris_blues » Sun Nov 24, 2019 2:18 pm

Thorsten wrote in Fri Nov 22, 2019 7:20 am:One could of course sub-divide the planet further - for low orbits, you'd get to see less memory occupancy because you probably never have more than four tiles in memory at once.


That would be a nice addition to earthview! Theoretically, if you're in a very high orbit, in certain situations it could be possible to see up to seven tiles at once. Well, actually mostly small corners of the tiles, but they would have to get into memory nontheless. So, smaller tiles would make a lot of sense! This would minimize the loading times and optimize memory consumption.

Unfortunately this would be a very time consuming process to change the script to generate more tiles. Once that's done, the new tiles will have to be carefully fitted on the model of earth. This also will take quite some time to do.

If anyone with more spare time than me likes to pick up a challenge, this would be a nice one!
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Hooray » Sun Nov 24, 2019 6:39 pm

Thorsten once said, the sphere would not be where we believe it to be - so I am not sure how the whole scheme is set up, but bugman mentioned on several occasions that he'd like to explore creating a planetary rendering engine, so that this could be used for other celestial bodies - it would certainly provide for interesting LOD experiments and schemes, i.e. some kind of fgdata-level infrastructure to hook up arbitrary 3D models with textures to make this work in a plausible fashion. Thorsten would be in the best position if that's possible or if that makes sense at all ;-)

But if it can be scripted, bugman and his Python background should surely come in handy ...
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Gomendio » Sun Nov 24, 2019 7:12 pm

Hi to all;

As a follow on on the earth view "default dullness"( no pun intended ) and the HD textures, first of all before starting off,
thanks for the reminder of the torrent link on torrent, Dunno how I skipped it but finally I downloaded the complete 6gb package.

I erased the basic ones and I'm only playing with 8k and 16K. I do have a nearly top end rig, GTX 1660TIOC 8gb and with 16Gb textures
I'm just "barely" be able to run it decently, but definitely it is a huge burden for my rig. Rolling back to 8k as soon as time permitting. I red above the possibility of mixing 16k for earth and 8k or default for the clouds. I'll try it, but I've found the process a bit awkward and not so intuitive to do.

The change has been for good though, now I can see more or less the earth as it should be, at least by seeing ISS orbit videos on youtube noticed that the default earthview was a bit lacking..so to speak. By saying on my previous post that I felt the earth "Dull" and unable to discern the countries was basically comparing with Orbitter 16s' earth. Anyway, wouldn't trade Thorstens' Shuttle for nothing. The "electric machine" is a gem on FG.

Thanks as always for the tips mates, and Gin Gin many thanks as well for the plume graphic tip on the youtube chat. Now the plume is much more consistent. Now I do need to give a try to the LEO targeting tool. I don't have the faintest about how to make it running. I'd like to sharpen a bit my calculations on proximity ops with Nc burns and Pc burns for phasing and Spec 34 on ops 202 with lambert. I do feel much more at ease now on orbit mechanics, phasing, prox and stationkeeping..( after months of reading and study. )
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Sun Nov 24, 2019 7:51 pm

at least by seeing ISS orbit videos on youtube noticed that the default earthview was a bit lacking..so to speak


At the time, adding hires Earthview textures would have quadrupled FG's download size. So since the spaceflight community is a rather small subgroup, we decided to not ship hires by default.

I'll try it, but I've found the process a bit awkward and not so intuitive to do.


Nothing much to it really - at worst you have to edit texture filenames in a bunch of files.

I don't have the faintest about how to make it running.


You open a console window, change into the directory and type the name and the input file.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby chris_blues » Tue Nov 26, 2019 11:37 am

eatdirt wrote in Thu Nov 21, 2019 11:25 pm:It would be nice to get some raw satellite data and do our own maps, but these days, these data are not easily made public :(


Maybe it's possible to generate the earth textures from our world scenery? This would certainly be a major undertaking in terms of computing power, but it's a pretty hires data we have there...

Just a thought...
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Tue Nov 26, 2019 1:13 pm

Doesn't look much like the real thing though...
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby GinGin » Tue Nov 26, 2019 5:53 pm

Thanks for the return .
I thought the 32000 pixel for blue marble meant it was possible to make them into 32 k dds files
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