I needed an orbital view of the South Pacific for a recent project, and once that was done decided to try my hand at the entire planet.
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So this is good for medium distances only: no displacement and low-resolution (2k) texture maps. I'm not much good at trig or vector math so the only way I could manage the day and night sides was by pulling the X component out of a Get Normal node and using that to mask the city lights shader. It works (and can be animated) but the sun direction must match the vector direction. I'd really like to know how to make a mask that can be rotated as needed. (In Maya, you'd use a sufaceLuminance node, which measures surface brightness. But I could find no equivalent node in Terragen.)
Since working on this I've found quite a few threads here dealing with planet Earth, particularly Ben's work at
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,19666.0.html. Truly amazing.
Here is the rendering used for the South Pacific project. The original was done at print resolution and used as the base of an infographic about fiber optic and satellite connections covering this part of the world. The clouds were minimized to avoid obscuring any of the graphical information, and the colors were heightened to make it more "maplike" instead of realistic. I wasn't happy with the original ocean so this uses a second planet with a water shader surface. Two renderings with a final composite in Photoshop just to keep it simple.
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