I was hoping to plot the Big Blue Marble over Topography, but can't find a way to do this. I tried displaying the basemap from the Formulas1.6 doc, step 12. This did not work for me either. The data seems to load in the field selector, but no image appears when displayed. The scale of the color table is grayscale with values from 0-255, but the active display has absolutely no data in it.
I'm not seeing a way to create a display of a WMS layer over topography when the field defaults to the WMS Control display type. I've written up McV Inquiry 2397 to add a 'WMS Control Over Topography' display type.
As for your blank image with the Formulas tutorial's basemap JPG file, is this something you are able to replicate every time you try creating the display? Using today's nightly, I was able to successfully create both '3 Color (RGB) Image' and '3 Color (RGB) Image over topography' displays several times on Windows 7 and OS X. Here's a zoomed in image of the '3 Color (RGB) Image over topography' display of the JPG basemap data over topography, which was set as the '2D > Mass > Geopotential height @ Ground or water surface' field of GFS Global 2p5deg data.
