Hughes, B. wrote:
> Looks pretty good, as is, actually. Something which could help it would be
> flows from higher to lower elevations, but probably very difficult to do,
> if not impossible. 
>
Yes... actually, the water level is not at the same height all over 
the image but real flow from higher to lower would require a somewhat 
different approach than I am doing right now. 

> And would be a good idea to try and limit parts from
> getting water too.
> 
In the right back, correct. I did not notice that before the final 
render. And a 5 hour render is not repeated quickly...

> Of course, one thing a planet with water needs is plantlife in at least
> some parts. Granted, there could still be somewhat lifeless regions caused
> by salty bodies of water and such, but not always (well, lots of
> unknowns). So maybe you could add a slope pigment to get regions looking
> like a kind of foliage is covering parts of the ground or along the
> embankments.
> 
Allright, there is no limit on the amount of time one could spend 
on making Mars look like a planet with plenty of life. 
But for now, I just wanted to get some realistically-looking water. 

> BTW, I didn't get back to one of your previous messages where you told of
> using a custom-made convertor of the MOLA img files. So thanks for telling
> about that. I was still looking all over for more info about the
> resolutions of the elevation data and I didn't get anywhere with that so I
> gave up trying.
> 
> Any chance you'll be making your conversion tool available? If so I, for
> one, have my hand out to await it. I'll try not to be pushy though.  ;-)
> 
You will need libz, libpng, libbz2 (on any recent linux distro), 
hlib (on my homepage) and Qt-3.x (only free for linux). 
Then, I could send you hlib-compression-addon, QTXlib and my conversion 
utility. Compile all that using gcc-3.x on a linux box and there you go. 
(The conversion utility has graphical output. When editing the source, 
you may come along without Qt and QTXlib.)

In case anybody (possibly you) is interested in that I may make it 
available on my home page in a week or so (there is an exam this 
week...). 

Wolfgang

Post a reply to this message