Where to find list of available textures?

[Hedonical]

Hi everyone,

First off huge thank you to everyone contributing. I have been testing this package out and have been loving the performance and visuals it can produce. I was looking through the example code and specifically have a question about plotter.add_base_layer(texture=gv.natural_earth_hypsometric()).

Is there a location that lists all of the available textures and maybe ways to add your own? Apologies ahead of time if it is in an obvious place, I looked around the GitHub and was unable to find anything.

[bjlittle]

Hey @Hedonical!

Thanks so much for the feedback - it's really appreciated indeed 🍻

So glad that you've found geovista and enjoying the experience so far 😄

Okay, so yes, there are other textures available "out-the-box" with geovista

You can find them squirreled away in the geovista.pantry.textures module.

So, for example you can do the following:

import geovista as gv
import geovista.pantry.textures

p = gv.GeoPlotter()
p.add_base_layer(texture=gv.blue_marble())
p.show()

As a convenience, these textures are explicitly imported into the geovista namespace. Alternatively, the following is explicitly equivalent to the above:

import geovista as gv
import geovista.pantry.textures

p = gv.GeoPlotter()
p.add_base_layer(texture=geovista.pantry.textures.blue_marble())
p.show()

Our texture mapping support is rather primitive at the moment, and is only available through the geovista.geoplotter.GeoPlotterBase.add_base_layer method, so if you're wanting to do something different, then I'd be interested in your use case.

The deal at the moment is that the texture you provide to add_base_layer is used to wrap a full globe, but I have work in the pipeline where you will be able to drape a texture over any geolocated mesh ... so watch out for that landing soon (hopefully 😉)

In the meantime, you can indeed give any .png or .jpg image as a texture and geovista will wrap it on the base layer.

e.g., rather than the stock NASA Blue Marble, you may alternatively want to use the lush NASA Black Marble.

If you manually download the NASE Black marble, say to the file black-marble.jpg, you can then do the following:

import geovista as gv
import pyvista as pv

texture = pv.read_texture("blue-marble.jpg")

p = gv.GeoPlotter()
p.add_base_layer(texture=texture)
p.show()

Which will give the following:

black-marble.mp4

Does this help?

[Hedonical]

Thank you so much! That was an amazing answer and helps a ton.

[bjlittle]

@Hedonical You've inspired me to raise issue #992, to add the NASA Black Marble to geovista 👍

[bjlittle]

@Hedonical Just out of curiosity, what platform are you running geovista on?

[Hedonical]

I am running on the latest stable version of Kubuntu with the latest versions of conda and Python. I am away from my machine but could get you more specific details if that would be helpful.

[bjlittle]

Thanks @Hedonical !

That's perfect 👍

I was just curious what platform you were using.

I develop on Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux, and it's difficult for me to test hands on with Windows or Mac.

We provided geovista on both those platforms but I don't explicitly test them on our GitHub CI, so at the moment rely on them "just working".

I may consider complimenting our test coverage on Ubuntu to run our testing on Win and Mac GitHub Action runners too. But previously when I investigated this it added quite a bit of time to our CI runs.

Something for me to ponder at this end 🤔

Anyways, much obliged, and thanks again 💯