Good Night Earth Dream

I can see my house from here...

Did you draw that all yourself (with the aid of a program of course, but still...)?

I think it looks great, but what is that light blue spot in the center (by Cuba)?

I can't wait...looks fabulous!  

Nope, all the imagery is freely available here.

I almost never run dreams, but this one would definitely be on my computer! Really nice, even if you composited the images.

The light blue areas are the shallow waters around the Keys,Cuba and the Bahamas.

Can't wait to see the finished dream.

Right... I forgot about that.

Looks nice, now if I only had Vista to enjoy it when finished  

I will have it soon though  

And we must wait another 3 day's

Which programm do you use? Might be handy Can I play with that stuff too

greetz,
svw

Most of it looks pretty good, but the edge of the earth atmosphere is too blue and too thick. Just search google for "earth sunrise" (and similar) and you'll see what I mean. Make sure you use actual NASA photos and not other people's renders, because they are wrong too, hehe.

And don't get discouraged. The atmosphere is REALLY hard to get right. I created many of the CGI planets for the Star Trek series, and that was THE toughest part to get right.

Once you have the atmosphere right, you might want to play with your shadow terminator settings as well. There is very little bounce light in space, to shadow terminators tend to be harsher than the default shader settings in most CGI programs.

Good work! I'm looking forward to the final.

It doesnt have to be that perfect

And now for something totally different: Does one of you guys know a prog. Where you can exclude the background. Like filming on a blue bakground and than paste over another movie. Adobe premiere elements wastn that good in it.

thx

Thanks to everyone for your comments!


I just got 3ds max and this is the first attempt at making something with it. It's a bit overwhelming with all the options. Much to learn!


Thanks Excalpius, your right, looking at some reference material has reviled that there is little atmosphere. I will play with the atmosphere some more, but I may leave it exaggerated because it gives me the impression that I'm closer to the surface rather than way out in space.

I was also thinking about added shadows of the clouds on the surface. I'll play with that effect and see what it looks like.

Thanks,
Master Baron

It has occurred to me that I may have this backward. The emptiness space should be on the top left where your icons would go. Maybe I'll reverse this dream to be "Good Night Earth" and follow the sunset around the Earth with the Earth rotating toward the camera instead of away.

*music* It's your Dream! Do what you wanna do!

Ah, that points out something that should be part of dreamscene, flip horizontal/vertical, yes? Otherwise, you'd need to create and upload two versions etc.

I was just about to suggest that to you. But I don't think it's necessary to change the motive to Good Night, don't you think it would be far enough just to flip it horizontally?

And you have my vote to make the atmosphere less thick. But otherwise, it's incredibly excellent job. Just as others of your dreams are. I've been using two dreams long-term so far, both from you ( Ripple Purple Rays and Flares ). For that, my gratitude goes to you with all sincerety. ( Sorry for boring post at the end, I just can't say this kind of things very well... )

The reason for making it a Good Night dream is that the effect of having the daylight on the horizon is more dramatic that it being night time. The rotation of the Earth dictates that I follow the sun as it sets.


Thanks, I've been playing with it and as Excalpius has already stated, it's hard to get just right. Thats why I started this post   


Thanks for the kind words and it wasn't boring to me   

Master Baron

I updated the image with a new render so you may need to refresh the page to see the new image. Let me know if you think the atmosphere is still too large.

And the render time has now jumped to 200 hours

Looks great, can't wait to see this one!!

I think I like the new one better.

Ahh, looks much better. I think it's still a bit chroma/blue though. The real atmosphere is a bit lighter/whiter from this angle, as it only looks blue to us looking up/out due to red scattering in the atmosphere. Otherwise, this is MUCH better!



For the whole animation or a still?! I hope it is for the whole animation, hehe. Welcome to CGI! I have a 12 CPU render farm behind my sofa.

Seriously though, you might want to check you anti-aliasing settings. Your instincts might me to max those out, yet the textures should render anti-aliased by default and you actually have no hard polygon edges to compensate for because the atmosphere covers them up. Hopefully, some 10 frame tests at much lower settings will make things easier on ya with some lower settings.

Lovely work, mate. Kudos.

Yes, entire render. 12 CPUs, very nice! I have a old dual processor P3 733 PC, but not sure how much time impact it would have on the rendering time.


Your right, I have AA all the way up. I'm getting lots of flicker from the bump mapped mountains that anti-aliasing seems to fix. I haven't spent time finding a happy medium yet. But I'll play with it before doing a full video render.

Thanks and your comments are very helpful!

Master Baron

There may be a "threshold" setting for anti-aliasing if it is "adaptive" in your renderer. You should be able to set it to "focus" on the high-contrast (re: bump mapped) areas while ignoring the flat simple texture mapped areas. Perhaps a 3DSMax forum would be the best source for those specifics, since I'm using terminology from other renderers, but that's the general idea.

Good, the updated image is much better. But still - do you think you could be able to make the atmosphere border a little transparent? I think transparency would make it look even more realistic.

Thanks Intri, I'm still tweaking it and I'll be posting a final shot in the next day or so.

Thanks everyone, I think I got a final product to render.