Hi all, thought I'd start a thread for renders and questions from this project. Aim is to create an accurate Earth, realistic from any angle, lighting etc. Pleased with progress so far, thanks to Bastien Muller for the original idea and direction on Artstation and Steve Boerner's planet tutorial for more detail.
Rendered in under 2 hours at 5000x3000px on AMD 3900x, 1.5 detail and 8 AA, which I thought was very good and makes rendering animation a possibility. Something new to learn! Note I'm having issues with intersection between the earth and ocean near the shore line which only seems to resolve by increasing the polygon detail to ridiculous numbers.
More to come, cheers
Absolutely stunning! I'd say one of the best earth images in TG I've seen so far.
Which intersection problems do you mean? Could you show a crop render that shows them?
It looks like your earth texture is flipped horizontally. If I'm not mistaken, you're showing flipped South America.
But the look is great!
I was doing some similar stuff for a movie matte painting. But since that time Terragen improved a lot and it inspires me for the remastering of my project :)
Oh yes! A stunning great render! Thumbs up!
Nice job Rogue. The detail on the clouds and river estuaries is captivating. I wonder though whether the highlight spread on the water is not a little too broad.
Brilliant image! The clouds are very nice, too.
Are the surface images from NASA?
Looks great.
Thanks all. Regarding the highlights, I often referenced this video which was useful for a lot of different aspects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6dtYdWPabI&feature=emb_title. Although having done a few more renders I'm starting to agree the highlights are overdone.
I'm moving the camera closer to get a few ISS style shots, the one above is shot at 300mm from far away which is probably making the scale a bit odd. The map isn't flipped, it's looking towards the east (sunrise) at the northern coast of Brazil.
To understand the intersection issue I have to give a bit of detail on the setup. I am using the NASA 8bit elevation for the positive displacement, and a NASA bathymetry map for negative displacement below the surface. But at 8 bit, neither map has enough vertical resolution to accurately define the coastline. For example in low lying land area, e.g. Florida, much of the landmass is still represented as 0 in the heightmap. There is also overlap between the elevation and bathymetry maps around the coastline, so I cannot raise these areas out of the water. As a work around, I have used another mask I found here (http://www.shadedrelief.com/natural3/pages/textures.html) which better represents the coastline (and rivers), and despite it's lower resolution, it allows me to better define the coasts. So I use this mask to raise the land out of the water, and sink the seafloor, by a fixed amount in either direction. You would think you would only need to do so by a few metres... but for some reason I cannot avoid the artifacts in the image shown unless I make these offsets at least 100m (the effect of which starts to become apparent if I render close ups). Increasing the micropolygon detail also seems to help reduce some of the artifacts. I figure the issue is that I have the ocean sphere too close to the planet, the darker/speckled areas being where the two surfaces are too close (and these go away as I increase the offset beyond 100m or so).
I'm at a point where I have mostly solved any issues that are affecting the final renders, but if there's anything I can do to avoid the offset I have had to create along the coastlines it may solve headaches down the track :)
Quote from: RogueNZ on May 08, 2020, 03:12:03 AMThanks all. Regarding the highlights, I often referenced this video which was useful for a lot of different aspects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6dtYdWPabI&feature=emb_title. Although having done a few more renders I'm starting to agree the highlights are overdone.
I have never been in LEO so I admit I might be wrong. :P
On the other hand, the video you linked here shows some spacious highlights at sunrise and sunset. The image you share with us seems to have sun hanging relatively high and that would lead me to think that the highlight should be more contracted. Like on the 0:03 / 0:04 mark.
This is a terrific image!
Quote from: N-drju on May 08, 2020, 03:20:33 AMQuote from: RogueNZ on May 08, 2020, 03:12:03 AMThanks all. Regarding the highlights, I often referenced this video which was useful for a lot of different aspects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6dtYdWPabI&feature=emb_title. Although having done a few more renders I'm starting to agree the highlights are overdone.
I have never been in LEO so I admit I might be wrong. :P
On the other hand, the video you linked here shows some spacious highlights at sunrise and sunset. The image you share with us seems to have sun hanging relatively high and that would lead me to think that the highlight should be more contracted. Like on the 0:03 / 0:04 mark.
Yes I agree, I definitely overestimated how low the sun is to the horizon. The effect is very interesting how nearly the entire horizon glows right on sunrise/set, the effect is not easily achievable in Terragen. In fact take a look at the settings I am using to cheat the 'rough' look ;D
Here's another image I rendered before making any changes to the highlights, so yeah a bit over the top, and exaggerated further by the long camera focal length, but I like the look anyway.
The NASA imagery isn't perfect, in this example I think the cloud map used over this region is a lower resolution than other parts of the globe. I plan on sourcing better quality satellite imagery in the future to enhance the map. I'd also like to try using the different satellite products such as infrared to make more complex cloud layers, e.g. colder clouds are taller etc
Quote from: RogueNZ on May 08, 2020, 07:55:53 AMThe effect is very interesting how nearly the entire horizon glows right on sunrise/set, the effect is not easily achievable in Terragen. In fact take a look at the settings I am using to cheat the 'rough' look ;D
Oh... These are indeed values one doesn't see everyday.
But - how about you reduce highlight spread value to a minuscule 0.005 or something? That really should contract the glowing area. Then, try to reduce highlight intensity a bit (50 seems quite a lot.)
Busy weekend, few more high res renders
Part two
These are great.
I'm most interested in your cloud and atmo settings.
I found in my experiments that the global cloud image did not give good results if plugged in directly to the cloud density slot.
I also had to increase the gamma and white point to get more detail out of the cloud maps.
Earth_26.jpg
Thanks Richard. I think an important step is modulating the cloud depth as well, and in this case I simply used the same cloud mask. It makes a big difference, even if not physically accurate.
I used a colour adjust node to reduce the white point of the mask as well. I adjusted nearly every parameter in the Cloud layer and Atmosphere nodes, spent hours doing so and eventually honed in on something that works. There was a bit of postwork done on all of the images including adding clarity and sharpness.
In my sunset renders I have a second atmosphere that is used to add more red colour (mainly to the water reflections) without affecting the main atmosphere too much.
Great series of great shots! Thanks for sharing the tgc.
Looks really good! Thanks for the tgc.
I should have also mentioned, if you want the highest quality clouds, you will need to download the two hi res cloud tiles (east and west) from NASA and stitch them together. https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57747/blue-marble-clouds (https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57747/blue-marble-clouds)
MY gosh. That's stunning. I'm still really early into familiarizing myself with everything that Terragen 4 can do, and that gives me a lot to look into.
Quote from: cyphyr on May 10, 2020, 03:41:09 AMThese are great.
I'm most interested in your cloud and atmo settings.
I found in my experiments that the global cloud image did not give good results if plugged in directly to the cloud density slot.
I also had to increase the gamma and white point to get more detail out of the cloud maps.
Earth_26.jpg
Also a very beautiful rendering Richard!
Thank you very much for sharing your Atmosphere Settings RougueNZ.
STORMLORD
Great work, very realistic!
Great stuff!