¡LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, GREETINGS!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for everyone.
This is the topic you have been waiting for, and if you didn't I DON'T CARE YOU CAN KEEP GOING IN THE FORUM ! My name is Santiago Morillo, and prepare for a educative and funny tutorial because this is HOW TO MAKE MAPS FOR PLANET EARTH IN SPACE ENGINE.
I will tell you a little about how my monstrous and uncontrolled ambition in Space Engine to make a detailed global map of the earth (AND in some future of Mars) was awakened. I had the 0980 version of Space Engine, I just spent it exploring the planets generated by the simulator, until I came across a Klud's addon and downloaded it, even though it didn't have the same detail as the procedural planets, it still surprised me much detail that this map had. (It was like a non-sexual pleasure to see it in this detail)
So I decided to want to make one too, I searched, and in the most stupid and innocent way, I went to Pacioos Voyager and started taking screenshots of the map of the shaded relief of Hawaii at its highest and "optimal" resolution and began to assemble the map in paint (I'm ashamed to tell you this LOL), and I sent a message to Klud, (Thinking I had the map almost ready) he gave me his email and I sent him a message, he replied, saying it was a shaded relief map of Hawaii and that would not work for the game, as it was not a digital elevation map. From there, he gave me a very detailed tutorial on how to make maps for the game, although we started in a somewhat messy way (It was partly my fault lmao) here on this topic little by little I will leave the steps that he gave me.
PS: We will use the 5th tile levels for basement.
0.- Programs you will need to make the maps.
Ok, let's start with the programs you will need for making the map.
1.- Space Engine (Obviously, you will need to test it unless you are a seer that can anticipate how it will look in the game)
2.- Photoshop (Believe me, we'll use this a lot in my case I have CS6)
3.- QGIS (Well need this for doing the gnomic reprojection from our downloaded DEM map from SRTM and other steps)
4.- SASPlanet (For downloading the images with coordinates from the surface/color map)
5.- Total Commander (Well need it for regroup the tiles in each single folder from 0-7 for renaming it and DON'T WORRY, IF YOU HAVE HIGH ABILITIES IN FAST WRITTING FOR RENAMING EVERY SINGLE TILE WE'LL COMPLETE THIS IN A MONTH OR LESS TIME)
6.- Advanced Renamer (I hope you didn't believe me with the joke above, this one is for renaming all the tiles and save us millions of seconds of time LOL).
Now, if you downloaded everything, we can start now.
1.- Looking for the tile of the zone of your interest.
Let's say that you want a very detailed map from your locantion, or some other place BECAUSE YOU AND I DON'T HAVE PATRIOTIC FEELINGS AND DON'T GIVE A F*** ABOUT OUR PLACE FIRST If that's so, in our case, I will use the Villarica's Volcano and nearby place from Chile.
That place in Space engine is the tile #7_119_84 in the face POS_Z (THE COLOR TILE IS JUST EXAMPLE, LOOK FOR THE BUMP MAP, WE'LL LOOK FOR THE BUMP FIRST):
[attachment=9]7_119_84_c.png[/attachment]
But we don't are here for this tile, we want the 5th tile were the 7_119_84 is included.
"AND HOW THE HELL WE'LL FIND IT SANTIAGO!?"
Relax your butt, take a sit, and just divide the numbers of the tile by 4 (Except the 7, you just minus it by 2, the resulting number of the tile is: 5_29.75_84 (Notice that 29.75? No, is not like that in the tile name, it's just the number that the calculator will give to you, so you can guess where is placed the volcano?... Don't cheat, and think about it).
PS: If you want to find some place that you're interested that is not Villarica's, just multiply by 2 every number from the level starting from the tile level 1, obviously you will need to make an effort to find the specific tile.
5_29_21:
Congratulations! You might have a smile thinking and hitting that the 7_119_84 is in the inferior left corner, but THIS IS NOT RELEVANT, JUST WASTED YOUR TIME A LITTLE BIT, AFTER ALL, THE KNOWLEDGE YOU WILL ACQUIRE AFTER THIS TUTORIAL WORTHS IT.
So, after having located the 5th level tile. extract it in the location of your liking in your Documents/Images/Music/Videos/Downloads/Desktop/System32 folder.
Now, we'll need to find the rest of the tiles from the 5_29_21, I will not troll you this time because I'm a little bit lazy on doing this but it's because you people want to do this too.
Notice that the 7_119_84 in 5_29_21 is a very small place, so the 7th tile levels that are in the 5th level are ALLWAYS 16 tiles (4 Rows, 4 Columns), may I invite you to go and look them by yourself in this order for finding the 7th tiles of 5_29_21:
First row:
7_116_84, 7_116_85, 7_116_86, 7_116_87
I won't need to tell you the other numbers, you just know the number of the first row, the rest is just 117, 118 and 119.
After this, Photoshop will enter at first.
2.-Cutting and assembling tiles in photoshop.
Before everything, here's an explanation from Klud of the tiles and their border pixels and what you will need to do for assemble them correctly:
Space Engine uses border pixels for overlapping rendering. So...
You need to reduce 2 pixels on each side of EVERY SINGLE TILE AND YES, YOU WILL NEED TO DO IT MANUALLY, It will result in 252x252 pixels, to do this in a fast way like I do, create 2 .psd files with the following settings:
1:
2:
Once you have every tile grouped in one folder, open one of them:
Ctrl + C, and paste it to the 256x256 .psd file:
Now as you seen in the image above, reduce it to 252x252 pixels or if Photoshop shows you the units in Inches, type 3.5 in Width and Height (Canvas Size or Ctrl + Alt + C, I suggest you to learn the fast commands, your workflow will be increased), now select all (Ctrl + A) and copy it (Ctrl + C), go to the 1008x1008 pixels .psd file and paste it (Ctrl + V):
[attachment=3]4.png[/attachment]
In this case we started with the 7_119_84, so I will make it from down to up until I have this result:
DON'T MERGE THEM YET OR YOU WILL STEP YOUR FOOT DEEP IN SH*T!
You may expand it (Image Size or Ctrl + Alt + I) to 16128x16128 pixels.
Make sure to use the Bilinear option instead of Bicubic otherwise you will see artifacts, ugly artifacts as 2020 was.
Now you can save it Like "5_29_21 16K" or whatever the hell you want, just after saving it you can merge them but don't dare to save the file with the tiles merged.
Now we have the 5_29_21 in 16k Resolution, but why? well, that's because:
So that means the tile 5_29_21 in the level 11 will start like this: 11_1856_1344, and end like this: 11_1904_1392.
in short words that you could understand, the tile's resolution (with the borders included) to 5-12 are duplicated since you go up to a higher level, if you go from 5 to 6 you have to multiply by 2 the pixels of the 5th level (if you want by exampe know how big will be the image in X level, let's say that you want to multiply our base tile from level 5 to level 10, you will need to multiply the value 256 5 times by 2, so 256 x 2 5 times = then the level 10 from X 5th tile level will be wide as 8192x8192 pixels), I will show you the actual size of the highest resolution of earth in Space Engine and a hellish estimated size with the other higher resolutions JUST THE BUMP:
5: 256x256 (It represents the 32k Earth HD): 1.1907 GB
6: 512x512 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It represents the 64k Earth HD): 2.3815 GB
7:1024x1024 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It represents the 128k Earth HD): 4.763 GB
8:2048x2048 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It may represent the 256k Earth HD): 9.526 GB
9:4096x4096 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It may represent the 512k Earth HD): 19.0520 GB
10:8192x8192 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It may represent the 1024k or 1 million pixels Earth HD): 38.10400 GB
11:16384x16384 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It may represent the 2048k or 2 million pixels Earth HD): 76.20800 GB
12:32768x32768 is the resolution of each 5 tile level (It may represent the 4096k or 4 million pixels Earth HD): 152.41600 GB
Add the size results in a single one: 1.1907+2.3815+4.763+9.526+19.0520+38.10400+76.20800+152.41600 = 303.6412 GB
This would be the size of the earth in Space Engine with the whole 10m Resolution data from SRTM (By example, Klud's mod BUMP MAP haves 12 level, the same as my mod of Hawaii and the surface and watermask as well, to represent the 10m resolution in the simulator we used 5th level tiles and expanded it to 32768x32768 pixels) but because our whole planet is not completed with the 10m resolution, for the moment we will work with 30m resolution (16384x16384 pixels each 5th tile level), so the size of the bump will be aproximatedly 151.2252 GB, including the other levels of course. UNLESS YOU ARE A DUDE WITH DARK FETISH.[/font]
For now, I will leave this like that, because it's too late, here is 5:07 AM and I'm having headache to fix this post LOL.