Earth Maps

[nildoe]

Hi guys..Im doing an animation with our planet...But I cant HIREZ Maps good enough to do closeups...do u any of u have or know of a plce a can find REALLY HIREZ MAPS?!

appreciate the help

Nil

[Kmar]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

[nildoe]

Wow cool Kmar...thx for the help..will check the site NOW

Nil

[egz]

If you want the really hires maps they aren't accessible from the website, but you can get them via FTP here:

ftp://visibleearth.nasa.gov/pub/EARTHVIZ/

The hires maps are these:
land_shallow_topo_21600.tif <-- the whole earth at 2km per pixel
land_shallow_topo_east.tif <-- eastern hemisphere at 1km per pixel
land_shallow_topo_west.tif <-- western hemisphere at 1km per pixel

Be warned that these are huge files, from 173 to 400 MB so you might want to chop them up into smaller tiles to be able to work with them in max.

[FutureMan]

Thanks for that link! I have been looking for that site but couldn't remember what it was. It's worth the wait for that kind of detail!

By the way how does Max load an image when it is used for a texture, does it store the file all in the ram? What about vray, how does it handle image texture files?

[b1017411]

Yeah great link... but what software can open bitmaps this large?

I keep getting memory errors

David

[egz]

I can open them in photoshop and max here, but I have 2GB of ram..

[b1017411]

ahhhh that could be it. I only have 512 MB

David

[Da_elf]

7130 pixels across and 4608 pixels down. thats where ill be in a month
on the 21600 version

[davexl23]

The problem is MAX cannot use large bitmaps - regardless of memory settings, memory fragmentation means that between WinXP and MAX, it cannot handle very large individual textures.

I had more success right after rebooting, but this is not a technique that you can usefully employ to render.

I was surprised to find very little information about this problem - I posted to the MAX forum and was told that "I have no trouble with 30mb maps" etc. Apparently very few people have ever attempted to use large (200+mb) textures. You can slice them up and apply them in smaller chunks, but what a PITA!

So I have 3G of RAM, but due to software issues I cannot easily use these lovely huge maps - I think the 12K / 206mb version I made was about as big as I could go reliably.

A great shame.

[FutureMan]

I seemed to get a result after I resized the image to 2160 X 1060. Now I can load it as the diffuse color map where as before it would give me memory errors.

[RErender]

You might also try converting it to jpeg, I convert the west topo to 7 quality in PS and it is 30 megs now, still pretty good quality.

[flipside]

Isn't it the same for max? If it's a jpg, max still needs to read every pixel. I thought that the jpg compression affects filesize, because it saves color areas etc instead of every pixel seperatley. But when opened in an image editor, the program still needs to translate this compressed info back into pixels, so it will eat as much memory as if it were a bmp.

but I'm completely not sure about this

[RErender]

Yep, guess that is true I get memory errors just trying to use either as textures...
Thanks for the insight