Surface Maps | Bump, Normal, Spec Maps | Cloud Maps | Night Maps | Close-ups | Other Earth Files
 
This page contains bump, normal and specular textures for the planet Earth.
Specular Maps: Specular maps mark surface areas covered by water, so Celestia can render these ares with specular reflections, i.e. they appear more shiny. This helps tremendously for rendering realistic surfaces. Note that a few surface texture already contain the specular map (as an alpha-layer).
Bump- and Normal-Maps: Both texture-types are used to generate fairly realistic shadows on the surface. To achieve this, Bumpmaps store the height of each point on the surface, while Normalmaps store the surface normals (hence the name), i.e. the vector perpendicular to the surface. You typically get smoother results with a Normalmap than with a Bumpmap.