We've all seen the Blue Marble pictures; they're almost cliche at this point. That said, they're also really, really cool. I tried to make it as realistic looking as possible and I'm pleased with how it turned out considering how simple it is. We really do live on a pretty planet...
http://gannaingh32.deviantart.com/#/d51188r
Very realistic result. Are you using displacement, does the terrain actually have height? How are you handling the water and transparency, if at all? Are the clouds a mask for actual cloud layers, and what is their altitude and depth?
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan. The terrain does have actual displacement, just an image map set to give a maximum displacement of 8848 meters (the height of Mount Everest). There is no displacement for below the ocean since I haven't gotten the bathymetry data to work properly. As a result, the water is just a reflective shader being controlled by a homemade water map to make sure the reflectivity doesn't extend onto the land. The clouds are actually two separate cloud layers (one with 500m height and the other a height of 2000m with altitudes of 2000m and 2500m respectively) both masked by the blue marble cloud map using the highest available resolution (43200 x 21600). All shaders have been adjusted for contrast, brightness, gamma, and saturation in photoshop to try and provide the most realism possible.
Thanks for the details. The results are of course what counts, but it's always interesting to see how things were accomplished. Since you've achieved a very nice result here that does rely in large part on publicly available data, and given Earth is a fairly popular subject, it would be very nice if you were willing to share your TGD (letting people download their own copies of the Blue Marble data, of course). :)
- Oshyan
Good idea, Oshyan. I'll tidy it up and label everything to make navigating all the image map shaders easier, then I'll post it over in file sharing.
This looks really good. Very natural. Maybe you could render an image without frontal lighting? This might add a little more depth imho.
its cool
Looks good !