#Earth Object
19 messages in this thread
Erik,
I downloaded your earth object last week and loaded it into LW today. What an
awsome collection of images!
The moutains and highlights along with the clouds have incredible detail. I am
animating 180 frames worth to see how they look rotating around – the Raptor is
on frame 85 right now its taking about 175 seconds for each frame in the
independent mode (each processor is handling an entire frame – kind of like
wavelink) so I am getting two frames every 175 seconds. I left all of the
setting the same for now, if I get closer to the object I will change the
Sampling threshold to 16 or something lower.
But just wanted to let you know I LIKE IT!
By the way, I am feeling pretty rejected right now as the test scene I uploaded
still is not on the Amiga Arts forum. I may have to have a "come to Jesus
meeting" with the Sysop on that forum.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Adib
Adib:
Thanks for the compliments! I owe much to the others on CIS who supplied
the original bitmaps. Using those bitmaps and some image processing, I was
able to fake things like altitude maps & reflection maps. (They're very
arbitrary, and you can pick out lots of physically impossible earth
climates in single frames, but it does look good as it whizzes by. :^)
'175 seconds for each frame' Is that at MedRes, LowAA,…? (I'll have to
dig up my old archive.)
I did one version of the earth that flew out from the surface and ended
with a sort of Universal Studios style logo flyon. I did it with motion
blur and LowAA – it looked beautiful, but took _FOREVER_.
(BTW, I have now realized that you can heighten the 3D appearance by
turning ambient light to 0 and using a distant light at about 20%. This
really makes the globe pop out.)
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom – ELF Works 3D Construction Co.
Erik,
The render I did was at Medium Resolution ( I left the settings at what you had
saved the scene at, except I changed the Adaptive Sampling to 16 from 32). The
time was 175 for two frames so 87.5 seconds per frame ( I used the independent
rendering mode on the Raptor to see if it works – it does).
Yeah, I agree, turning off or lowering the 25% ambient light setting makes
things a lot more dramatic and removes that clean cut CGI look.
Its a really nice object and scene and thanks for uploading it so that the rest
of us can enjoy it. No one, except maybe a NASA scientist would pick out the
little stuff you have mentioned, how many people have acutally seen how the
earth looks from space?
Adib
When you turn off the ambient light, use another 'distant' light source to
illuminate the backside. (While not 'accurate' it really pulls out the
curve of the darkside of the planet!)
Thanks for the timing, though I can't remember what the original scene
came out as. I'll try to dig out my original scene file and see what it
does. The last time I rendered it, I had made a number of changes, and
used Motion Blur _&_ Field Rendering. (Hey, I knew I was going to be out
of town for a week, and I figured I'd keep my machines busy. :^)
Now, if you _ever_ come across a nice sequence of cloud maps for the
planet, GIVE ME A CALL!<G> That's currently one of the weakest points of
the object….
Oh yeah, there's a bug in the surface texture of that old archive. For
some reason, I get weird vertical artifacts in certain areas of the
surface when I'm real close too it. The only way I could figure tou get
rid of the problem was by turning of Pixel Blending & Anti-Aliasing on the
Bump Map texture for the earth surface. Just thought you'd want to know
… :^)
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom – ELF Works 3D Construction Co.
Thanks for the tips Erik.
As for a sequence of cloud images for the earth, one of my friends is a space
nut and links up with the NASA computers once in a while and has a whole host
of mercator maps on almost every planet. I think he even has mercater maps of
all of Jupiters moons! I'll ask him if he has seen anything interesting that
can be spherically wrapped on an object, particularly clouds for a transparancy
map.
Adib
I would be _VERY_ interested in finding out about good FTP sites for NASA
stuff.
See if you can get a list of sites from your buddy….
Thanks!
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom – ELF Works 3D Construction Co.
you got it. I will harrass him tomorrow.
PMFJI, but I recently ran across a few sites that might interest you. I am
not the most internet-experienced person, but hopefully these will be new
to you.
FTP: //images.jsc.nasa.gov (login as anonymous)
GOPHER: //images.jsc.nasa.gov:70/
http: //images.jsc.nasa.gov/html/home.html
see also:
pubinfo.jpl.nasa.gov (new hubble stuff–cool!)
explorer.arc.nasa.gov (GIFs galore!)
Later 🙂
Stephen Bailey
Sawyer & Bailey Film and Video – Chicago
Thanks for the site info. It's my girlfriend that does most of the
internet surfing, so I'll see if I can get her to look into them for me.
Thanks again!
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom – ELF Works 3D Construction Co.
No problem. Glad to help.
Stephen Bailey
Sawyer & Bailey Film and Video – Chicago
Adib:
I wouldn't mind having the mercator maps of the various planets,moons,
etc. See if he'll upload those, as well.
-Pat "Cruising the North Coast
on Autopilot"
Well, I would probably be the one uploading them (of course I haven't had much
luck in this area – but I'll give it a shot).
He says he has a mercator map of Jupitor's moon Io, but I have asked him to try
and get the actual high-res images NASA has – you know the ones you see in the
expensive books.
I will post a message when I get the images and upload them.
Adib
I do 3d work for the planetarium industry, who or where is Io's image map
locad?I'm interested. Please keep in touch. Tony Butterfield Planisphere
Productions
Tony,
My fellow coworker at the office was telling me about all the various mercators
he had of the solar system. So today he brought in two huge books will all
kinds of maps in them and he also has a mercator of IO.
He flys through the Internet a lot, so I have asked him to download the actual
images from NASA rather than me having to scan them in and lose resolution and
quality. He said that he will do it – I will download these images as they
become available to me. I will post a message in the Amiga Arts forum and will
upload them into the 24Bit arts library. I will also try and get nice images
of the various nebulas as they would make good transparency maps for space
scenes.
Adib
Thanks for the info. Tony Butterfield Planisphere Productions
Adib, PMFJI…..Can ya ask yer friend the Interent guru how to DECOMPRESS
Files recieved thru interent that you use the Compact command on…
I just got a LARGE file which once UUDECODED SHOULD have given me a file
named gdm1.zip unfortunately because I used the compact command in my
script I have an interim Z file that needs to be decompressed.
Thanx ALOT. I'd hate to have to DL this 800k file again. Espescially
considering when doing it via Email the file gets encoded into a series of
msgs. Something like 120 msgs of Gibberish that you uudecode into an
actual file
Peter, I will ask him on Tuesday after the holidays.
Adib
Great!
-Pat "Cruising the North Coast
on Autopilot"
Thanks, it would be appreciated.
-Pat "Cruising the North Coast
on Autopilot"