Soyuz TMA and detailed Earth

[starbase1]

Hi All,
I've been working on making a high detail Earth, so I can do scenes from low Earth orbit. The space craft is a Russian Soyuz TMA.

These still needs a bit of work - in particular I am aware that the lighting is not matched on the desert one. (I rendered the backgrounds separately).

I'm also not sure the composition is right, it's something I always end up doing by trial and error.

I'm also keeping cloud to a minimum here, they look very soft as I can't get anything like the same resoltion in a clopud map as for the Earth maps. I tried Lunarcell generated ones, but found them very unconvincing.

Everything done in Lightwave 8.5, no clever plugins apart from IFW2 heavily used for the Soyuz surfaces.

All suggestions for improvement gfratefuly received!

Nick

[Scazzino]

Looks great! :thumbsup:

One thing that I might suggest is to vary the black covering texture a bit on the spacecraft, it looks a little too uniform and clean.

[starbase1]

Looks great! :thumbsup:

One thing that I might suggest is to vary the black covering texture a bit on the spacecraft, it looks a little too uniform and clean.

Thanks Skazzino - I think you are right. Maybe a little noise in the specular channel, ior add somme smaller scale ripple bumps.

Nick

[JeffRutan]

Well, very nice work so far! The Earth surface just needs to be a bit hazy (too sharp now). You could probably do that in post easier than inside LightWave.
Of course, I prefer this image! ;-)
-Jeff

[starbase1]

Thanks Jeff.
I've been piling in as much detail as possible because I want it to end up being printable poster sized! I think it will not look excessively sharp when done at that size... For one thing I will have to subtley blur the nearest parts to avoid revealing pixelation.

That picture of yours does look rather too hazy compared with many I have seen... Incidentally I'm happy to share tips if you want to go for a high detail Earth yourself...

Nick

[H_Molla]

very nice work..i think some clouds will make it more sexy & some specular at the far edges of the earths will be very good... check superman the movie website & see the shoot when he dive2earth & u will get what i mean..

by the way do u mind if u tell me where i can get hires global map especialy for egypt area for a project i am working on rightnow??

thanks & keep the good work.

[starbase1]

I was wondering about cranking up the specular on the water a bit...

There are a very few clouds in there - I'm not really happy with the way they come out though. I just can't find cloud maps at anything like the same resolution, and scaling up does not really work well... I'd love to hear if anyone can tell me how to crack that though...

The image maps are the Nasa Blue Marble, Next Generation - there are 12 sets, one for each month!

Start here:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_set.php?categoryID=2355

They are a bit scattered, but [oke around and there's loads of good stuff.

You can get MUCHbigger images into memory if you convert them to 256 colour indexed PNG...

Let me know if you get stuck...
Nick

[JeffRutan]

Thanks for the offer for help, and I may take you up on that starting with my next project. However, the shot I posted here is an actual still image taken from a low-res video. The video camera was lip-stick-sized, embedded in the vertical tail on one side of SpaceShipOne. (so it could take video of itself and the Earth and radio it back to mission control in real time). I was not suggesting you use that as an example. I just like the image because it is one of my dad's projects. ;-)
-Jeff

P.S.: Thanks for the Earth image links too!

[Skinner3D]

:stumped: Stupid question which one is which? I like the one on the left better, but I can't tell which one to vote for.

[starbase1]

The one on the left, with more green, is the Caspian Sea one - it is over western Russia looking south. The one on the right, with more yellow, is looking north up along the Red sea towards Cairo, with the Nile on the top left of the image.

[starbase1]

Here are some experiments with clouds - I think that some of the clouds over the other parts of Earth were inherently soft edged. This is better, but still a little soft for my tastes.

I think the strong spirals help give a sense of scale and shape though.

Nick

[DogBoy]

My vote is for the middle of the three. The right-hand one looks too image mapped, for my tastes. The middle one has more balance between clouds and ground.

Otherwise, as always I like your space work.

[angman]

I like the middle one best - and I think this will add a lot to the original composition. It certainly is more attractive with the clouds as well as - I believe - more believable.

Angier

[klanderud]

Wow, I like the images very much. Depending on the situation I think either first or middle earth is the best. I am not sure, but I think the earth needs some illumination or a bit more glow to its edge and a little more lighter blue ocean. Still its a better earth then what I have made in the past. It makes me feel like making another one. Check these nasa images out

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_402.html

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_336.html

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_324.html

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_154_catalina.html

[starbase1]

Again, thanks to all for the responses.

Klanderud, the cloud and limb images you lnked to are done with some telephoto - extreme telephoto fopr the limb shot. The limb brightness is about right as I have a fairly strong wide angle, (camera zoom about 2), to emphasize the sweepeing curves, and hide the limits of the image map!

The final image will be submited for exhibition by the International Association of Astroniomical Artists, so I am taking great pains with realism!

I want to find a place with something of the shape of the red sea one, with something to lead the eye from corner to horizon.

But I think I will be somewhat distracted with V9 of my favourite toy for a little while! Maybe that will let me get the full res image maps in...

My favourite source for imges of Earth is definitely:
http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/

The clickable map you can spend days browsing, but the Technical Search page:

http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/page.htm

Is great if you want to control the results in terms of everything from Auroroa to Zoom.

And the images often go up to several thousands of pixels across...

Nck

[klanderud]

Nice links, thank you, I probably will use it in a future animation.
Good luck on the exhibition

[Bog]

Gleep.

Starry, old fruit? How much beer to I have to ply you with to get you to either do a high-res Earth tut, or to share your maps?

For the record, I liked the one on the left better. I'm wrangling atmo at the moment (still playing with my take on Jeff's dad's pocket rocket) and it's doing my bean in trying to get it working procedurally. I'd just an internal organ for an up-to-date version of OGO_Taiki right now...

[starbase1]

Well, 1 would probably do it!
:beerchug:

The basic technique is pretty simple though. Use Blue Marble Second Generation maps, 1/8th earth at a time, reduce them to 256 colour PNG. (Thats a pole to the equator, and 90 degrees of latitude - that makes mapping easy). With 256 colour PNG maps, you can use 9000x9000 pixel images on a 1 Gb memory machine.

But the main reason I am not doing a tutorial or download yet is simply that they are not really finished. As others have remarked in other threads round here, Nodal may allow for a better airglow, (I'm not 100% happy with that), and the clouds are still somewhat weak. This mainly because the cloud maps are much lower resolution than the land, and I have yet to find convincing fake ones. (Lunarcell does not impress me).

The other thing I am SURE can make better is to switch to a normal map instead of a bump map for the Earth geometry. The effect of that on my moon model was astonishingly realistic to my eye, (and I have seen the real thing through some big telescopes). I'm really looking forward to seeing what that does to the mountainous areas lit at a shallow angle!

When I get done, and a bit of time, I intend to knock up a tutorial, and probably offer 1 quadrant as a download if the file sizes are not too big... Then people can use the tutorial to make the others, with an example to follow. I'd also be happy for it to appear in a content download when that gets updated...

If you go for Infinimap, it should be possible to use the highest resolution blue marble images for the whole earth in one go... But its not cheap...

Nick