CG Earth HD

A series of test shots from Project Eden (http://project-eden.blogspot.com), an attempt to create a photorealistic 3D Earth using computer graphics. These shots are done using Houdini and composited using Nuke and After Effects. Features include: Sun, Moon and Earth are constructed to scale - orbital distances, inclinations, axial tilts are based on scientific data and constructed to relative scale - orbital and rotation times are to relative scale (time is speed up about 1000x on average) - terminator reddening (local lighting changes across the terminator to reflect day, sunset and night - implemented in VEX shader) - atmospheric scattering (faked using multiple concentric transparent shells with altitude falloff and other density factors) - volumetric clouds (very badly faked using displacement mapping) - displacement mapped topography - specularity for inland rivers and lakes (lower resolution than terrain data, and poorly hacked in Photoshop) - city lights (looks cool but should not be visible for realistic "daylight" exposures, also low resolution but with additional detail using procedural patterns) More detailed project development information can be found on my blog (http://project-eden.blogspot.com) Music by Ty Unwin from the BBC documentary "How Earth Made Us" Thanks for NASA for the Blue Marble 2005 dataset ^^