RSS Correct Ultra High Resolution Unique Galaxy Background CubeMap

[Galenmacil]

 

A not so photo realistic, good looking, Sun's perspective correct , ultra high resolution Milky Way background CubeMap for TextureReplacerReplacement.

 

Album gallery/oh4OK will appear when post is submitted

Methodology used in SpaceEngine:

1 - "Land" on the Sun.

2 - Orient the camera so that the equatorial grid is aligned (Top is North), looking through the 0h, 0° coordinates.

3 - "Disable" the Sun and planets.

4 - Adjust magnitude limit and stars brightness to adequate level.

5 - Generate the cubemap. Each of the 6 images are 6000x6000, 24 BPP, lossless compressed .TGA file.

I tried going higher than 6k for the resolution but, SpaceEngine being a 32 bit application, this is not possible. It would crash during computation...

 

Download the regular version (DDS files, DXT1 surface without mipmaps) here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1nhycghmkretyx6/TRR_UHD_MilkyWay.zip?dl=0

Download the lossless, compressed TGA version here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjkkw4dnd229ezk/RSS Correct Cubemap.zip?dl=0
 

Original post below

Spoiler

 

Hello everyone.

I have spent the last few hours creating a unique "galaxy background" for KSP. The 6 generated cubemap textures, compatible with TextureReplacerReplacement, are lossless 6000x6000 pixels ".TGA" @ 24BPP. Most of the hi-res cubemap for KSP are usually 2048x2048 to 4096x4096 in size which I think is not high enough...

 

And guess what, the Kerbol system do exist! Well, at least in SpaceEngine... It is located at roughly 8220 light-years from the Sun:

A section of the CubeMap scaled down to 1024x1024 for previewing.

The relative position of the Sun and Kerbol in the Milky Way

Kerbol "seen" from the Sun. (The nearby star on the left is the Sun)

 

Download Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e07vtfzhlln2h9h/CubeMap.zip?dl=0

Be warned, the total uncompressed size of the 6x .TGA is roughly 550mb.

 

 

Edited October 19, 2017 by Galenmacil
Changed download link to DropBox

[Galileo]

Pretty cool! But I would use a different host for the download and screenshots. Media fire is not allowed in the forums  

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Does TextureReplacerReplaced work in 1.3.1?

I'm going to give it a try, I'll let you know how it goes.

EDIT: It works and it is...well...they should'ave sent a poet.

(Click and enlarge for full sized picture, looks way better. The compressed one really obscures how many tiny little stars there are.)

Edited October 13, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket

[hypervelocity]

is this compatible with RSS? i.e. tilted the correct way?

[Galenmacil]

6 hours ago, hypervelocity said:

is this compatible with RSS? i.e. tilted the correct way?

Hummm... No special precautions were taken. Can you explain or give a link to what should be done to make it RSS compatible?

Edit: OK, so, from what I understand, I used six 90 degrees images exported directly from SpaceEngine. I had to exchange the Y+ and Y- image then flip the Y+ image on both axis to have it display properly in KSP.

Edited October 13, 2017 by Galenmacil

[Poodmund]

7 hours ago, hypervelocity said:

is this compatible with RSS? i.e. tilted the correct way?

1 hour ago, Galenmacil said:

Hummm... No special precautions were taken. Can you explain or give a link to what should be done to make it RSS compatible?

Like: https://www.dropbox.com/s/83g4d9w953coza8/tilted.zip?dl=0 ? Is that what you were after? I panned the map -90 degrees and rolled it -29.2 degrees to try and simulate the Milky Way from our perspective.

Edited October 13, 2017 by Poodmund

[Galenmacil]

Thanks Poodmund for clarifying this. I can officially answer now: No, this is not a earth perspective correct CubeMap. I'll try and make one "as seen from earth" though with an even higher resolution, if SpaceEngine does not crash!

Edit: Done. Updated OP.

Edited October 15, 2017 by Galenmacil

[HaArLiNsH]

Nice job ! I really like it

BUT, its not in the right format (should be .dds) and moreover, its not in the right custom folder.

 Here is a proper version of your skybox  : TRR_Galenmacil_Skybox

I named the file TRR_Galenmacil_Skybox and the folder itself TRR_Galenmacil. This way, if you publish it on CKAN , you will be closer to TRR in the list and more people should see it.

I'll definitively link this skybox in TRR

[Galenmacil]

21 hours ago, HaArLiNsH said:

Nice job ! I really like it

BUT, its not in the right format (should be .dds) and moreover, its not in the right custom folder.

 Here is a proper version of your skybox  : TRR_Galenmacil_Skybox

I named the file TRR_Galenmacil_Skybox and the folder itself TRR_Galenmacil. This way, if you publish it on CKAN , you will be closer to TRR in the list and more people should see it.

I'll definitively link this skybox in TRR

I forgot that this could be done in TRR with a .CFG file. Was doing it the old way. As for the .DDS format, I too prefer that format since it loads directly to VRAM and can also include predefined mipmaps...

However, it is a "lossy" format. Not as bad as JPG but I wanted to distribute them as perfect as possible. Also, if mipmaps are used, they are counter productive for the background Cubemap. At least for very high resolution as they will get used instead of the actual full sized images. So you end up with a 2x lower resolution results... This was tested positive with a 6x 4096x4096 cubemap at 2560x1080 screen resolution. So you can imagine the impact with 6x 6000x6000 at screen resolution lower than 1920x1080.

Edited October 16, 2017 by Galenmacil

[HaArLiNsH]

Its automatically converted by TRR at the loading anyway. So its better to make it yourself the best way possible.

I indeed did the mipmap , I can make another distrib without them if you want. Or you can make them yourself too, I used DDSconverter to convert them in .dds. Don't forget to flip them vertically first.

You can still propose the .tga in another distrib that you could call "sources" or "raw". Anyway, don't hesitate to modify the files I linked, its your mods  

[Galileo]

Save your images as dds L8 format. It’s lossless. I would have to advise against DDSconverter, unless you absolutely have to use it. There is no control over the type of dds format you save in with it. If you don’t have photoshop, use Gimp and the DDS plugins for it.

Edited October 16, 2017 by Galileo

[Galenmacil]

On 10/16/2017 at 4:05 PM, Galileo said:

Save your images as dds L8 format. It’s lossless. I would have to advise against DDSconverter, unless you absolutely have to use it. There is no control over the type of dds format you save in with it. If you don’t have photoshop, use Gimp and the DDS plugins for it.

Well, using L8 (Luminance 8bit) would result in a monochrome image... This is what happens in GIMP. There is quite a bit of confusion regarding DDS format and compression type. I was confused too when I started dealing with that format...

I used GIMP, forcing R8G8B8 format, no mipmaps and no compression so no quality loss.

6000x6000x3 bytes (24 bits per pixel) should give a file 108,000,000 bytes in length (not taking into account the 128 bytes DDS header) . That's roughly 102 MiB. The six TGA files, with lossless compression, in comparison, weight between 4.2 to 16.8 MiB. Since the bottleneck when loading image file is the reading speed of the IO subsystem rather than the CPU/GPU computational capabilities, I see very little benefits in converting them to lossless DDS format...

Guess what? I'll just leave them as TGA files and let more advanced users do what they think is best...

Edited October 19, 2017 by Galenmacil

[Galileo]

I use L8, no compression, just fine with color in Gimp.

Edited October 19, 2017 by Galileo

[Galenmacil]

On 10/16/2017 at 3:45 PM, HaArLiNsH said:

Its automatically converted by TRR at the loading anyway. So its better to make it yourself the best way possible.

I indeed did the mipmap , I can make another distrib without them if you want. Or you can make them yourself too, I used DDSconverter to convert them in .dds. Don't forget to flip them vertically first.

You can still propose the .tga in another distrib that you could call "sources" or "raw". Anyway, don't hesitate to modify the files I linked, its your mods  

HaArLiNsH, can I add these lines to the .CFG file that I will distribute with the textures:

Spoiler

 

isCompressionEnabled = never

isMipmapGenEnabled = never

 

The goal being to prevent TRR from compressing and mipmapping the .TGA file on load? Will this affect other texture packs with a different configuration?

Edited October 19, 2017 by Galenmacil

[Poodmund]

4 hours ago, Galileo said:

I use L8, no compression, just fine with color in Gimp.

I'm not sure how as L8 is an 8 bit alpha only. RGB is fully transparent, but the original greyscale Luminance is preserved in lossless compression in standard black to white format in the alpha channel. L8 keeps itself in the alpha channel only, which is the only difference between itself and A8 where the same is kept in the alpha and red channels. This is why L8 is handy for images like Heightmaps where only the greyscale luminosity values are required.

[Galileo]

Just now, Poodmund said:

I'm not sure how as L8 is an 8 bit alpha only. RGB is fully transparent, but the original greyscale Luminance is preserved in lossless compression in standard black to white format in the alpha channel. L8 keeps itself in the alpha channel only, which is the only difference between itself and A8 where the same is kept in the alpha and red channels. This is why L8 is handy for images like Heightmaps where only the greyscale luminosity values are required.

Then perhaps I have my formats confused. 

[HaArLiNsH]

7 hours ago, Galenmacil said:

HaArLiNsH, can I add these lines to the .CFG file that I will distribute with the textures:

  Hide contents

 

isCompressionEnabled = never

isMipmapGenEnabled = never

 

The goal being to prevent TRR from compressing and mipmapping the .TGA file on load? Will this affect other texture packs with a different configuration?

This is the last part of my mod I don't have yet looked at

I think I will need to make some changes to allow us to make a list of the mods/textures we don't want to compress/ create mipmap. If I understand well the system as it is now, if you put these settings, it will disable the compression and mipmap generating for all the textures.

I'll look into this in the coming days. 

[harbingerdawn]

On 10/13/2017 at 1:00 AM, Galenmacil said:

I tried going higher than 6k for the resolution but, SpaceEngine being a 32 bit application, this is not possible. It would crash during computation...

The crash was probably a graphics driver timeout, not a direct crash from SE. You can change the timeout duration (time before the driver resets) in your registry. But anything higher than 4k for a skybox is excessive. You'd either need to zoom in considerably or be playing on a 5k+ screen to need more than 4k resolution.