TG Earth model progress.

[bobbystahr]

Scary ...cool...thanks for the peek under the hood as it were.

[bigben]

I'll release this more formally in the file sharing section later with a more complete example.  This is so far the best solution I've come up with for this particular problem.  You may remember some of my earlier attempts, particularly this (scarily old) one: http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,2519.0.html.

Applications include pretty much anything that uses real world imagery as texture, and it provides some possibilities for tweaking the input images to make better masks that would otherwise have seemed unrealistic e.g. greatly lightening shadows for high res images or content-aware deletion of shadows from lower res imagery.  Also allows for re-colouring of false colour satellite images directly in TG.... lots of potential

[bigben]

Incorporated the sea ice mask onto the ocean sphere. Here's a sample low enough to see the 2.5m thick edge of the ice shelf off Greenland.  Tossing up ideas to rough up the edge.  Might go with a masked PF to provide smaller ice chunks in the surrounding water.

[Oshyan]

Ice shelf! Coooool. This is turning out even better than I had hoped, thanks to you and your creative, inquisitive mind Ben.

I see a ground-to-orbit Earth video in our future (without transitions).

- Oshyan

[bigben]

Yes, you know the ground to orbit animation is always at the back of my mind when working on this sort of stuff. It's looking more feasible now. I've been looking at the coastal bathymetric data and much of it appears to be already incorporated into the global dataset I'm using, albeit at a slightly lower resolution. I'll add it in to a later release of the elevation model as I have to do some intermediate cleanup and they're too big to work on with all of the other data loaded at the same time.

I'll release a few other components to get some ideas from others on some of the masking challenges. E.g. City lights are challenging as the data is technically a mix of lights, atmospheric glow and lens/sensor flare. I'm thinking some square'ish blocks might help break things up a bit more. I have them as 1m circles at the moment but they still look like amorphous blobs from a distance.

Getting close to a beta

[bigben]

Had to do an ice shelf image with context  .... a little lower, atmosphere and dirty (dark texture) polar bear for scale

[Oshyan]

That polar bear is filthy.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

If you could take the (edge of the) shelf through a surface shader, you can warp it into loose chunks here and there and/or use the breakup with an adapted breakup fractal (other fracture noise and using not only color) to break pieces of ice of. Just an idea.
Awesome progress!

[bigben]

Roughing up the border is on the cards. There is actually plenty of greyscale mask to play with as the map represents the historical range of ice cover for a given month. Rather than provide 12 image maps I'm thinking of combining them into a single map for the year so that the ice cover can be animated more easily. That could also be used as a kind of density map for loose sea ice.

[bigben]

So you can teach an old dog new tricks  My first warped mask thanks to an example TGD in the files section by some guy calling himself Dune.   

The dark line at the ice/sea border was annoying me but it was actually correct for the structure of the model. Rebuilt the sea ice model and eventually ended up with a second planet with a negative displacement for the bottom edge of the ice and a masked displacement to build the sides and top.  The rest of the planet surface is transparent, so you see the ocean floor where there is no ice.  For the floating bits of ice I'm thinking of masks using the fake stone shaders, using the gradation in the ice cover map to control density and thickness. Just don't take the camera under the ice or they'll see it's fake.

[bobbystahr]

heh heh heh...and it looks really good...

[TheBadger]

This is crazy. You are crazy.
I like it.

[lat 64]

Given the adult polar bear size, your ice edge seems to be about 5 meters showing above the water. That would make the ice edge there about 45 meters thick!
Mean first-year sea ice thickness in the last ten years has been less than two meters. Depending on the season, Most ice edge extent is first-year or seasonal ice. Ice piles up in ridges and makes some impressive cliffs, but mostly I think its a small drop to the water from the ice edge.
Old ice like the Ross Shelf in Antarctica and multi-year ice that does not melt can look just like your renders.
I think it would/will be awesome to have control over this as users of your model. Thick where we have old ice and thin for first-year ice.
I getting exited about the prospect of playing with it.

Do we get the Polar bear too

Forge on,

Russ

[bigben]

Those sort of things were in the back of my mind while doing this but I've just used random numbers for now and haven't researched ice formations yet... Thanks for the kick start. I'm just building the basic model for now but keeping in mind the need to control settings and create masks for additional features such as you have mentioned. The massive ice shelves in the Antarctic are included in the DEM and this ice map adds in the seasonal sea ice. By combining the monthly coverage maps into a single greyscale image I think it would be reasonable to use this to also generate masks for different ice formations based on the age of the ice.

PS. The polar bear was a freebie off T3D. You can have the bear if you really want   Must check the scale of the bear. Ice is 2m above, 7m below in this

[TheBadger]

I usually read too much into things, so I am trying to temper my expectations here. But am I wrong to be really excited about what can *probably* be done with this?

What should I really be expecting out of the box here? From mid to high orbit (at least) will this be photo real?
I was thinking that was the point, and then the user would have to do detail work at ground level. But watching you get into the ice here, Now I am thinking even large swaths of the terrain will be photo real, say as close as 30meters or so. Even better? No?

especially when people post the link to that "wanderers" short film, in the other thread, and then Oshyan says the challenge is to do even better. Is this going to be better? What will be the distance between the finished model, and a finished high quality render, do you suppose? If that is even a fair way to pose the question.