NZ with blue marble

[bigben]

Here's a preliminary version of my NZ orbital render using the Blue Marble textures. Technical details are already posted here: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2502.0

The sun's reflection off the water is a bit noisy but that's a result of my EXR conversion... something I'm still struggling with although this is one of my better conversions.  One benefit of using EXR is that it shows up the red decay at the edge of the globe better which may provide better lighting with renders looking into the sun.

The snow on the slopes angled towards the sun are still bugging me a bit. I'm leaning towards reducing the contrast to darken the highlights of the texture image and possibly increasing its gamma to lighten the darker areas.

I've done a bit more work with the clouds while this was rendering but it's at last looking pretty good. For comparison, here's an older orthographic render in TG0.9
http://picasaweb.google.com/ozbigben/TerragenRenders/photo#5096531565120271250

[Will]

the terrain detail and coloring is superb, keep it up.

[jo]

Hi Ben,

That's pretty cool - I can see where I live ! Well, the general area anyway :-).

Regards,

Jo

[dhavalmistry]

this is very good....

anybody see "Shire" (LOTR)

[bigben]

Give me the coordinates and I'll have a look 

Here's a small test of the same TGD with the colour adjustment I alluded to above and a basic fractal displacement (100m vertical displacement fractal, faded in from 700m to 2200m). Camera height 2.6km above terrain.  I was pleasantly surprised at how good this looks without any extra surfacing.... lots of potential.

[edit] A quick google... http://www.asni.net/lotr_map.html should do me [/edit]