Photorealistic Earth
 

Hi! This is my first space stuff. I have done the earth, and i want to do venus and mars also. It was a little tricky, but finaly....

looks sweet how did you do it?

not Photoreal, but great to be sure!


wires?

howed you do it?

I would guess texturing a sphere and add some glow to it...:p

look pretty real though.

First you need a lot of ram, and then a few hires earth maps like: surface map,specular map, available at earthobservatory in 8K resolution.Then search the web for good looking hires clouds map, also 8K.Then i made a sphere and scale it at 127.6, since the earth ecuator length is about 12760 Km. This sfere will have the surface map shader.Then i duplicate it and scale it 100.2%.This will be the clouds sphere.This enlarges the sphere so that the cloud tops are around 15 miles above the surface (relatively speaking, that is... the actual scale is 1/100th that in these models).After that i duplicated this sphere also and scale it 101.7%...from the original sphere to make the earth's athmosphere. This expands the sphere so that it extends about 120 miles or so (relative to the scale) which is where the atmosphere thins out to nothing(This isn't extremely precise).Plus, the atmosphere always has a different look depending on the Sun's illumination angle and a myraid other factors that just can't be simulated in 3D. Some photos of the Earth from shuttle orbital altitudes show an extremely prominet limb, while others don't appear to have much of a fuzzy edge at all.).I added also a bump map to earth and the clouds layer. The last sphere i made a gradient transparency with the help of facing ratio atribute, and i added some glow.I use one directional light with 2.5 Intensity, to give a little crisp falloff.To avoid overblowning i twicked out the diffuse of the shaders.First render it's creap, but i spend about 4 hours tweaking this.And by the way i used a machine (because of the hires maps) with 4G of ram and 2xdual core proc(this is from the office).At home, where i have single proc and 1G ram it just crashes....(I have some closeups but i'm not sure if i can post them...firm policy)

So...some other image.I'll try to make the sun rising behind...

Wow! It's pretty impressive, waaay ahead of what I can do. Right now, I'm wondering if you are going to add shadows for the clouds and mountains and a rougher texture for the water...

Tried to PM this, but it's too long. For the benefit of everybody else, I'll post it here rather than emailing.



Wow!, Tutze de Mutze!! :D

Nice model man!

Thanks for the heads-up about earthobservatory. Have also got in mind a render of our solar system. Perhaps even a bit further out into space.

Was just wondering, if the diameter of the earth is 12760km wouldn't you want to scale by 63.8? Scaling a sphere with a radius of 1, by 127.6 gives you a sphere with a diameter of 255.2.

Sure, it's no big deal - it'll just throw off the position of the clouds and the atmosphere, since they're scaled by an amount that assumes the planet is 12760km in diameter.


I think if you try these values you will find that your model better represents our planet.

1) Make sphere. Scale by 63.8 Freeze transformations
2) duplicate, set scale to 1.00376
3) Select initial sphere, duplicate, set scale to 1.0300

This will create 3 spheres with diams of
127.6 - Earth (diam = 2*63.8 = 127.6)
128.08 - Clouds. (earth + 15(24km) miles each side) 48km total
131.44 - Atmosphere (earth + 120(192km) miles each side) 384km total.

Using these figures rather than the ones quoted results in a higher cloud layer and thicker atmosphere.

Don't believe me? Just check for yourself. Load your scene, use these numbers. This will produce something 1/2 the diameter of yours. Freeze the transformations then scale my one by 2 and put the two planets side-by side. You'll see what I mean.

Use Create->MeasureTools->Distance, vert-snapping on the two poles of each sphere to check it's diameter.


All that said and done, your model still looks BLOODY GREAT. Be sure to post the result if you try it and are pleased.


Simon

Wow! I just scale everithing 1/100.I 'll use your calculus
in future closeups that i need after the holydays.10x!

PS: about the rougher sea and the cloud shadows, i may fear that the machine will crash.I'll try with smaller res of maps.

Hey man can we see a the texture for this bad boy?

I used 5 textures: One for surface color, one for surface bump, then a specular map for the suraface that i pluged to specular roll off of the blin material that i used for the surface.Then for the clouds sphere, i used a color map with alpha channel for transparency, ans also a bump map for clouds , that is derived from the clouds map (you know ...desaturate then levels in photoshop).This is a sample of the clouds map(640X320). PS: all maps have 8K.

freakin nerd...(no offence but woah man woah)


cool model i gotta check out earthobservatory and try this myself time to put it all in a notepad...

wow i like it alot, looks amazing dude!

is it really necessary to make a model of the earth 'to scale'? i mean when you think about it, any sphere is 'to scale' with the earth as long as it's not ovoid...

nah, no need to make any single sphere to scale, but this thing's 3 spheres to do the clouds and the atmosphere, so scale is what puts them all in order. What if the clouds had a larger scale than the atmosphere? Sure, that's an extreme example, but the aim here's photorealism I thought.

@ acid44: :zzz: Yeah, whatever.