Hello and welcome to the second version of Mars Central. This site hasn't had an update since it was launched and I felt that with all the updates being done to Earth Central that it was time.
Now this time round I have an all new 16k texture of Mars. It is based on a blending of Mario's Space-Graphics.com 16k Shaded v.3 and 16k Flat v.3 Mars textures. By doing a blending of the textures I was able to give detail to the flat version of the texture that was sorely missing and also lighten the shadows of the shaded texture to a more pleasant level. So this is a lightly shaded texture. In the end the results are very nice but far from what I would consider perfect. Mario releases these textures in a medium quality .JPG format that does introduce some compression artifacts into the images. I have tried to clean this up as much as possible and unless you zoom in very close to the surface, casual viewing will not reveal the artifacts. I have also created a nice 16k Normal-map to go along with the texture. It works quite nicely and the normal DXT compression artifacts don't show until you zoom in fairly close to Mars surface.
Together these textures will enable any Celestia user to emulate a fairly accurate and convincing looking Mars. As always make sure your video card can handle multiple 16k textures before downloading the larger versions. There are also 8k, 4k, & 2k versions available for download for those with limitations in there video cards. Of course the textures can be mixed and matched in different size combinations to suite your needs.
I hope you enjoy the new Mars textures as much as I enjoyed making them. Keep an eye on Mars Central for further Mars textures to be released.
Future releases include; Mars 3-Billion-BCE and an update to my Terraformed Mars texture. I am also considering releasing parts of the sets of 8k Terraformed Mars textures that accompanied the Mars Terraformed Educational activity that I worked on with Frank. These 8k versions have never been made available to the public and there are quite a few of them so I will pick and choose which ones to release. Of course they are not quite up to the quality I am now known for but they will be a nice addition to anyones texture collection.
