Celestia Planet

[selden]

FWIW, here are three 8K texures in jpg format (to keep their sizes down). They're the surface texure, bumpmap and specular map.

These 1-2MB maps have serious defects when examined closely due to the lossy JPEG compression. The accompanying planetary image and closeup were generated by Celestia. For them I used the lossless PNG equivalents of the JPEG maps, which were more than 5MB apiece. The original uncompressed PPM images were 96MB each.

The land-and-snow-locked lake in the upper center of the planet image and in the closeup is split across the edges of the surface map at its upper right and left corners..

The maps were created using the fractal planet generator "planet" by Torben Æ. Mogensen running under Cygwin on a 1.86 GHz Core2Duo system running Windows XP. Each map took a little over 8 minutes to generate from the seed 0.74321

[icosahedron]

Cheers Selden,

Here's a pic showing your regional detail set into Zeta's planet, and then a zoom to show my original inset inside that.

The more levels there is, the better it looks.

However, I'm beginning to think that I should go with a simpler planet render, eg from something like Fractal Terrains, as it will be easier to match insets that way.

Thanks guys, with your help my little experiment has been a success and has given me much food for thought.

PS. Can someone tell me how to insert the word 'taken' into the thread title? I changed the title on the first post, but it didn't change it in the thread title.
Thanks.