So I haven’t posted in a few days. There is a good reason, I assure you. Among about fifty other things, I’ve been laser focused on getting my planets looking good. The biggest problem I’ve come up with is how to compress the normal maps and have them still look good. For those who care, here is what I’m doing now.
Use a DTX5 compression / format for the surface format of the texture. I know, I know, this leaves artifacts galore. Now, change your normal mapping shaders to re-normalize the texture lookup values. I went from “your moms so ugly…” to “Wow.. she’s hot” in one line of shader code. Also, my file sizes went from 16 megs with NO mip maps to 5.4 megs WITH mip maps.

I think I’m happy.

Dan