How to create moving continents, early Earth to present day Earth

[cinematical]

Hello all,

I'm working on a project that involves animating a planet viewed from space. Originally I was going to direct and shoot the live-action components of the short, while a partner would create the CG sections; that's taking too long, so I decided to just learn how create the planet myself. After a lot of research I came across Terragen 2, and the speed with which I was able to make an incredibly photorealistic landscape has me thinking this could be the best solution.

The gist of what I have to create is a planet view where we watch the evolution of Earth in fast-forward. From semi-molten to continents and oceans, from Pangea to present day. The attached image is from the storyboard treatment, and gives a good idea of the shot and the approximate look I'm aiming for.

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

Thanks!

[Oshyan]

Coincidentally, I was working on a similar project some time ago, with the opposite goal (melting and then destroying the Earth ). Where did your storyboard image come from?

I was working with a guy here named Freelancah (Sami) who created a quite nice lava world. You might try contacting him as the workflow we were creating would be similar to what you'd need here: http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,11970.0.html
The general idea would be to create the planet in each of the major states you want it to evolve to/from (easiest with 2, before and after, but do-able with more). Then you can use various methods to fade/transition between them, starting with the simple Merge Shader, which would do a fairly basic fade-like transition (depending on blend mode, mix shader, etc.), or more complex as-in adjusting coverage and displacement of various surface shaders and terrain displacement. You could use an image sequence for continent movement if it needs to be accurate and if such a sequence of e.g. continental movement is already available.

Just some preliminary thoughts to get you started...

- Oshyan