OK.  Thanks!

Jim

"Scott Gammans" <deepgloathatesspamaatyahoodotcom> wrote in message
news:web.3fc297e265df8252cbec1f9c0@news.povray.org...
> Your guesses are correct; I did rename the NASA files to make them easier
to
> find on my workstation. Shoulda mentioned that in the posting above, huh?
> :)
>
> I did *not* get the landmask file from NASA's Visible Earth website; I
don't
> remember where I got it but it wasn't at NASA. You can do what I did and
> Google for "earth landmask high resolution" (I think that's how I found
it)
> or better yet, you can create your own landmask file with any decent photo
> editing program and the truecolor TIFF file from NASA's website. How to do
> this is left as an exercise for the reader, but what you want to wind up
> with is a two-color mercator image of the Earth where the land is white
and
> the water is black (that way, the texture map applies the specular water
> highlights only to the black areas--where the water is).
>
> One final note--there are many ways that my Earth model could be improved.
> The cloud layer is an infinitely thin layer right now with no thickness.
> There is no bump map to give land features any visible height (although
> honestly, at the distances you'll normally place the camera from the model
> you shouldn't see any height anyway--that's why I removed the bump map
that
> used to be there... the extra CPU cycles didn't produce any visible
> difference that I could see). The oceans are a flat blue with no waves
> (again, scale issues), and the specular highlights on the water could be
> improved.
>

Post a reply to this message