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

[Thorsten]

You actually should be looking at this

No only normal mapping:



Including heightmap



(less haze over the mountains, parallax mapping aka mountains in front tend to obscure what's behind (a bit...)

[eatdirt]

Wow, never spotted the haze affected by altitude before, that's impressive!!

[legoboyvdlp]

Both sets of screenshots are absolutely fantastic

[Thorsten]

Well, given that I won't go to space for real and this is as close as I'll get, I invested quite some work to make it look as good as possible...

[GinGin]

Nice shots.

@EatDirt: you were saying that with highest resolution textures, Height is not present like on your first screen ?

[eatdirt]

@Gingin, the story is a bit of a mess as there are a few generations of maps around.

Let's say that you can first check that in the files normalmap_earth_*.png you have an alpha channel. If you don't have one, then, they the normalmaps work for the lighting, but you're missing the parallax and the haze effects Thorsten showed. If you have an alpha channel which is 0 everywhere, instead of encoding the height as it should, then, most likely, the normalmaps are essentially useless (that was my case.)

Things should be fixed soon.
Cheers.

[eatdirt]

Hi there,
we've fix the script with Chris, that you can find there:
https://github.com/chris-blues/Nasa2FGearthview

I am playing with the 16K textures and the UFO, that's just beautiful, well, more, that is quasi perfect even when flying super low. I am gonna make a movie at some point, but I've got another question about that picture:



It is only earth texture 16K, nothing else added, no normalmap, no overlay. But if you look carefully, it seems that there is some big pixels in the intermediate regions between land and ocean, it is like blocking!? It is not clear to me if that effect comes from the NASA world textures, or something else in the picture generation script that could be improved? (same effects with 8K, so that's not oversampling).
I can see this part of the picture in the input worlds_*.png files, but it does not seem to look pixelated like this, everything is more or less smooth like the land (I've removed any filtering in the viewing soft to check). Maybe Thorsten you've an idea what's going on here? Could I improve it by smoothing things in the world textures?

Thanks!
Cheers,
Chris.

[GinGin]

Great work

[chris_blues]

This looks more like some other texture interfering. Maybe some clouds or heightmap? Or maybe some filter. I seem to remember there were filters to make the citylights seem more detailed.

[Thorsten]

it seems that there is some big pixels in the intermediate regions between land and ocean, it is like blocking!

I guess they're chiefly in the reflection? Reflection is color-based, but it doesn't generate any coarse pixels, so they must be (although with near-identical color) in the original texture.

[eatdirt]

@Chris, possibly, I am trying to check if textures obtained by removing the land_ocean_ice map are free of this effect.

But I guess they become very visible when the sun reflects on them here:

Code: Select all

oceanness = smoothstep(0.0, 0.1,length(texel.rgb - vec3 (0.007,0.019, 0.078)));


their texel.rgb being fluctuating quite close to the ocean's color, the specular enhancement is also changing from one pixel to the other. So we could try to smooth these parts of the picture in color space, or set some threshold here, or add noise to create some smaller variations? Thorsten would know I guess.

[eatdirt]

@Thorsten, yes, sorry I missed you answer, yes you're completely right!
@Chris, test just made, even without land_ocean_ice, it is here. Moreover, we are essentially in the blue, and 8bits per color is really not too much!

[chris_blues]

Indeed, the pixels in the water range from #00000c up to #020514 ( #rrggbb ). So that's probably just the sattelite imagery that captured different shades of blue. And where the water gets deeper, it's more likely to get an uniform blue...

Not sure, if there's anything I can do about it...

[eatdirt]

Not sure, if there's anything I can do about it...

Yes, I don't think that's easily removable indeed. I played a bit with the smoothstep of oceaness in the code, clamping outside [0.05, 0.10], or [0.05, 0.15], helps a bit, but I don't know if that will be destroying other things.

[Thorsten]

Not sure, if there's anything I can do about it.

Obviously you could manually repaint to the same blue hue (or automatically, though I don't know how that works).