Hello ! any chance to make Night time earth (view from space) in terragen ?

[MentalRayUser]

I saw earth made in terragen but its day , very impressive quality but I wonder if I can make night ?

I want this kind of quality , with clouds etc etc .. but night
with city lights and all that stuff

[Oshyan]

Yes, certainly you can do that. NASA makes a "night Earth" image available that you could use to control luminosity:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167
I would suggest using Blue Marble data (link above) for height (displacement/bump map), color, and even cloud map, along with the night cities map for luminosity. Map them all in Spherical mode through Image Map Shaders and you should get a good result quickly and fairly easily.

- Oshyan

[MentalRayUser]

Yes, certainly you can do that. NASA makes a "night Earth" image available that you could use to control luminosity:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167
I would suggest using Blue Marble data (link above) for height (displacement/bump map), color, and even cloud map, along with the night cities map for luminosity. Map them all in Spherical mode through Image Map Shaders and you should get a good result quickly and fairly easily.

- Oshyan

Thank you for reply , well I was thinking about using texture for city lights (I just don't know how terragen works) I'm a newbie in terragen , so might be some silly questions )
you said cloud layer , well the most of all in terragen I like cloud quality, its just amazing how light interacts with clouds
well I don't want to use any maps for clouds , I could do that internaly inside maya .
well , I'm expecting this kind of workflow to work: find a good texture maps maybe from NASA , apply a texture on sphere , then cover planet body with terragen clouds (not map opacity, but real terragen clouds) maybe make some ambient light on them + ozone
and export all that separately , layer by layer . is that kind of workflow real with terragen ?

and I hope to render each frame 15 -20 minutes on my 5820k 4.5ghz
I think you have a lot of experience to average a time for that 1920x1080 frame
what do you think about timing ?

Best Regards !

[Oshyan]

Yes, all of that should generally be possible. Render times are difficult to predict, however. Renders from space are usually very fast in Terragen, but it depends primarily on the quality and complexity of your clouds. That is the main thing that would slow down a from-space render. Other than that it should be very fast.

You would need the Professional version to output render passes (layers/elements/"aovs").

- Oshyan

[MentalRayUser]

Yes, all of that should generally be possible. Render times are difficult to predict, however. Renders from space are usually very fast in Terragen, but it depends primarily on the quality and complexity of your clouds. That is the main thing that would slow down a from-space render. Other than that it should be very fast.

You would need the Professional version to output render passes (layers/elements/"aovs").

- Oshyan

mm ... lets say you need to do that type of work on that CPU
on what amount of time per frame you would count on ?
I would like to hear some super averaged time , I understand no one can say Exactly
as I said good quality Full HD night time planet with ozone and good quality clouds , with further AOV exported for post processing 
if still hard to say time , let it alone then )

[Oshyan]

If you use a single cloud layer of v2-type clouds (which work better from orbital view, v3 is better for ground view), then I think you should get around 15 minutes per frame on that CPU and speed (at 1080p). If you made the scene a bit more complicated, or needed to animate it (and thus need some higher details or other settings to avoid animation glitches), then it would be a bit slower of course.

Attached is a test I just did, on my 4.2Ghz i7-2700k it was about 24 minutes. You have 2 more cores than I do, and 300 more mhz per core, so I think that's a pretty good guess. Best thing to do is just try it, the free version will work fine for this.

- Oshyan

[MentalRayUser]

If you use a single cloud layer of v2-type clouds (which work better from orbital view, v3 is better for ground view), then I think you should get around 15 minutes per frame on that CPU and speed (at 1080p). If you made the scene a bit more complicated, or needed to animate it (and thus need some higher details or other settings to avoid animation glitches), then it would be a bit slower of course.

Attached is a test I just did, on my 4.2Ghz i7-2700k it was about 24 minutes. You have 2 more cores than I do, and 300 more mhz per core, so I think that's a pretty good guess. Best thing to do is just try it, the free version will work fine for this.

- Oshyan

Thanks for providing an example
Great thank you , I think I will spend minimum 40:00 minute per frame
because your image is little bit cartoony while I need more realistic result
like on first image or this one here :
http://www.studiolafrance.com/wp-content/gallery/main/Elysium_earthShot2_source.jpg

[Oshyan]

Yes, I just made a quick version. The colors are provided by an image from NASA. They are more exaggerated, while you could use a different image with more realistic colors, for example. There is a lot of possibility. I think (hope) you know that the image you linked to is also Terragen.

- Oshyan