Earth

[chrisisbacky2k]

i thought i throw this together with textures i had hanging around on my pc.

[gnu]

not bad. maybe work on the atmosphere tho, needs a blue hue around it.

also maybe a few less stars and more galaxys or such to liven up the larger space areas.

with some good lighting you got the start to a cracking picture there.

[KissMyGrits]

It seems like the are a lot of odd light spots all over the planet surface. Are the clouds surfaced onto a seperate object that is just a little larger than the planet? If so it would probably be better to just put them on the same surface as the earth map.

Oh, and I don't believe you can ever have too many stars.

[sanuZ]

nice, but i agree with the lighting,they iz abit odd,maybe putting a light at the back of the earth?very dim ofcourse,and darken the diffuse/luminosity a bit!

Would make a nice backround image:rolleyes:

[renatolazzaroni]

Originally posted by KissMyGrits
It seems like the are a lot of odd light spots all over the planet surface...

It's always possible that the spots in question are lights from cities lit at night.

I like the texture in general but lighting looks odd. It looks like the sun is only lighting North Africa. When North Africa is lit, so is South Africa and Europe. The sun light should go from pole to pole.
Just my comments.

Renato

[chrisisbacky2k]

yes the lights you see in the dark side are supposed to be the lights from cities ect.

the clouds is on a seperate object and is using a transparicy map, and the lights that u see on the dark side uses a luminosity map.

Gnu, in answer to your replay i am currently working on a hue around the edge and this also may get rid of where you can see that the clouds are a sepperate object! thanx guys!

[Remi]

Some astro-clouds...dust with neat colors...atmosphere....and perhaps the moon in there somewhere....would look cool.:)

[chrisisbacky2k]

ok this has a bit of extra on the backgrond but i hav hit a snaag with the lighting for the citites which i was trying to create.

i wanted the lights from the cities on the dark side but not on the light but then i get the strange lighting as you can see in the first picture.

does anyone have any idea on how i dould do this?
(i know this is now in the wrong section for asking!)

[KissMyGrits]

Did you just put in images of galaxies? They look overly pronounced compared to the rest of the image. As for the city lights you should try making clusters of very small lights in populated areas, and of course only on the dark side of the planet.

[chrisisbacky2k]

this is the image map i have that show the lights at night but i don't know how to make them only appear on the dark side!

any ideas of how i could do that?

[KissMyGrits]

Well, assuming you are useing a color and luminosity image map for the lights (quite a stretch for an assumption), you should probably use an incidence angle gradient on the luminosity channel and select the key light. There might be an easier way, but I can't think right now.

[riki]

It looks a bit rough. I think you need to do a bit of research. Get some ref pix.

[Antimatter]

its actually very simple to get the city light to only appear on the dark side of the planet.

anyway the key to get a good city light on the night side is to get a better map, that one u have is dirty, you want a map with ONLY the city light on it. i belive blue marble at nasa has such map.

anyway onto to the mini tutorial.

i had 4 sphere.

1. land, with the base texture map
2. nightlight, about 0.1% larger than the land sphere
3. cloud, about 1.1% larger than the nightlight sphere
4. air, provides the blue glow around earth, about 1.1% larger than the cloud sphere.


now i load up the object into layout and apply all the texture map where it belong and do any setting related to cloud, specularity, air etc.... what we will focus on here is the city nightlight setting.

first step is i set the color of the surface to (255, 255, 217) RGB
then i set the luminosity to 90% diffuse to 100% transparency to 100% refraction index to 1.0 and everything else to 0.0%

now click on the T next to luminosity. here i have one layer, an procedural texture with blending mode set to normal, its an turbulence procedural texture, i use it to make each city light little bit darker or little bit brighter, basically there to give little bit of varration in the light.

now click on the T next to transparency, this is where we will use our city light map. i have two layers here.

First layer
This is the layer we use our city light on, setup the maping, use spherical projection and what so ever, just get it to align with the rest of your maps, then set the blending mode to alpha and were pretty much done with this one.

second layer
this one is below the image map its the layer that controls the appearing/vansishing of the city light map, but we need a light source, which is probably will be your sun.

Anyway here's the setting.

Layer type: Gradient
Blending mode: Normal
Layer Opacity: 100%
Invert Layer: Checked <--- this is the IMPORTANT one
Input Parameter: Light Incidence
Light: your light source, aka your sun.

Then for the actual gradient, i have two keys.

The first one is.
Value: 100%
Alpha: 100%
Parameter: 0.0

Second key
Value: 100%
Alpha: 0.0%
Parameter: 6.9474 <-- basically you tweek this one untill you like the effect, it basically sets when the city light will begun to appear.

anyway for the smoothing setting i used spline for both key.

sigh newtek disabled the attachment thing, oh well.