How would I go about making ultra high res maps of Earth regardless of how much space they would take up?? I saw the grand canyon mod and know its possible. I just need a few pointers as to were to get started. The steps that I need to take and programs that I need to do so. Once I get it down I will do local requests for people and eventually try to do the whole Earth, although at that res. I imagine it would be a TB lol.. Thanks. 

Unfortunately, it looks like it could be more than a terabyte.

Calculations:

Size of Earth Surface textures in SolarSystemHD & SolarSystemUltra:
[list]
[*]Layers 1-4: 129 MB
[*]Layer 5: 297 MB
[*]Layer 6: 944 MB
[*]Layer 7 (Solar System Ultra): 2,790 MB
[/list]
It appears that with each new layer, the size approximately triples. Thus, to get the entire Earth's texture to the precision of the Grand Canyon mod (Layer 11, with bump at Level 12), it could take up anywhere from 200 to 700 GB.

This is the surface layer only - to get the bump map (which increases by about 350% with each step) would probably take an additional 2 TB, and that's not even taking into account the lights and the clouds.

Though keep in mind, the Grand Canyon needs to be very detailed. Most parts of the Earth aren't nearly as remarkable, and you could probably get away with using repeated textures or compression.

tornadotodd wrote:

How would I go about making ultra high res maps of Earth regardless of how much space they would take up?? I saw the grand canyon mod and know its possible. I just need a few pointers as to were to get started. The steps that I need to take and programs that I need to do so. Once I get it down I will do local requests for people and eventually try to do the whole Earth, although at that res. I imagine it would be a TB lol.. Thanks. 

Where can I get the Grand Canyon mod?  I wish we could have something like that cover the entire surface of the earth!

A-L-E-X wrote:

Source of the post I wish we could have something like that cover the entire surface of the earth

It's possible but would require petabytes of storage.

Yes and I haven't even downloaded the HD or ultra textures because I hardly spend any time exploring the solar system, Doc.  In your opinion do you think it's worth it?  What about this new Gaia add-on?  I'm hesitating because if we don't know the actual classification of the stars then what we see in the add-on could be all wrong.

If there was a ultra HD solar system pack with over a TB I still would download it.

Well the max HD I have right now in my system is a 1 TB mech HD (it has SE on it) along with a 500 GB NVME SSD.  I also have an extra 2 TB HD but its 5400 RPM and a 2 TB external HD.  I haven't used those yet.  Do external HD have a high failure rate?

Depends on brand, some are a yes to that.

Anyway 4-6TB is almost the norm how and drives are really cheap, the mechanical ones. Even 1TB SSDs are pretty cheap now and dropping fast as there is a over supply of NAND flash.

Yes SSD are becoming cheaper than RAM!