Problem Texture artifacts

[Scorch]

Hey everyone!

It's been a long time...but I still lurk a few times a week

Anyway, I love 2016. Fantastic textures....just beautiful. I sat down to play around a bit tonight and noticed a few things. I did some forum searches and didn't see anything *quite* like this...so forgive me if this is repetitive:

I noticed on the "Atlantis Cockpit" scenario, I get some funky effects in the water (see first image). Now, I can make this go away by turning off specular reflections from objects, but I was wondering if anyone had an idea of how this issue could be repaired? I do have the high res textures installed, and I did try reverting back to the standard textures. It seems to happen with both.

The second issue I noticed is a "banding" effect in the clouds (see image 2). This issue disappears when you turn off the cloud layer. Has anyone else seen this? I'm running a brand new 64 bit Dell with Windows 10, Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 2.5 GHz, 12 GB RAM.

 

[Scorch]

Ok, so the first one seems to be rectified by fixing the mask.tree file. It looks like I accidentally forgot to drag and drop that one into the Earth/archive folder. Still looking into the texture banding issue with the clouds.

 

[martins]

Regarding the first issue: The most likely cause is that you downloaded the high-resolution surface textures, but not the high-resolution water masks. Whenever Orbiter renders a high-res tile (in your picture, any tiles that contain land areas) it doesn't find the corresponding mask tile and therefore renders it without specular reflection. However, this problem should disappear when you revert back to the low-res surface tile package. You say it doesn't?

Regarding the second issue: does the problem go away when you turn off the cloud shadows, rather than the clouds? The problem of projecting the cloud shadows onto the no longer flat planet surface isn't completely solved yet and can produce artefacts. You can avoid this by either disabling cloud shadows, or disabling rotation of the cloud layer. (CloudRotPeriod -> infinity in the config file).

 

[Scorch]

Martin,

That did it! I never thought to try turning off the shadows instead. Looks like the problem is fixed. Thank you! Fantastic job, as always!

I also just wanted to say that I've been using this sim since 2001. The knowledge and skills I acquired actually helped me start a career at NASA, so thank you for motivating me to new heights in my early years!