The shader you see is all procedural . Please comment, it needs a lot of improvements ! The clouds will be added on a second sphere, so don't worry about it . Do you folks know any good site where i could find pictures of the earth ? litst

check out the Carrara gallery you'll find some images of planets and a link to where he/she (sorry don't remember who at the moment) got the tmaps. If the link is broken or the pics no longer posted let me know and I can email the tmaps to you. By the way thanks for the tip on modeling I was starting with way to many vertices. I hope to have a first effort to show everyone later this week (time permitting).

Oddly enough I am in a similiar situation to you litst. I am working on a project where a camera looks at the earth from space and then needs to zoom into the USA and stop and a house, go thru the window and look at a texture mapped tv. I am trying to figure out a good way to accomplish this. Any takers?

While I'm no expert it seems as if you you could change the image as you go through the clouds. If ya know what I mean .

well its a matter of scale...Carrara seems to poop out when you start modeling in anything bigger than inches. I have been useing the p3 500 with 500megs of ram @ work and it just dogs out with a large sphere. @ home I have an athlon 900 with 256megs of ram...maybe I can retry it there. I think the computer here only has an 8meg video card while I have the Geforce at home...

Stacey, when modelling you usually gotta keep you model very simple at first, and then add detail . A sphere with 8 or 24( i think it's 24 ) faces usually does it for the start of a face . Waiting to see your work ... :) Brent, about your animation : i made a try once . I've found that the camera moves very slowly when you work on a big part of the scene and vice-versa . Try to change the size of the cam in the properties tray to see if it affects its speed ( and tell me if it works ! ) . I would suggest to render your animation several times in different scenes . Begin with the "space to earth" part : render your animation . Then group all your scene ( including the cam ), scale it much bigger and work to the " earth to US " part in another scene . Repeat the steps, adding detail each time, til you get to the TV . Is that clear enough ? An idea : if the TV shows the earth, then you could do a seamless animation : the effect is garanteed ! Good luck !!! litst

I was playing with scaling before. I'll post up what I find out. I made a big earth and then scaled a building really small and put it on the earth...Carrara doesnt scale things very small :) the geometry was all messed up...I am thinking of doing it in two shots and useing after effects to blend them....first going from space to atmosphere, and then from atmosphere (ie clouds) I ll zoom to a house.

Brent, Rent the DVD or tape of "Men in Black." It was on broadcast TV recently. Fast forward to the end of the movie for the best pull-back from Earth I've ever seen, from a close-up to a galaxy in a few seconds, all very smooth. I suspect they combined rendering with compositing. Lot of tricks taught by those few frames. It's all about illusion. SMcQ

Stacey has the right idea. Select several levels of detail and zoom from one model of preliminary details to a more detailed model and progress through each level. Zoom scenes as you described are usually pieced together from several clips with transition point like going through clouds.

The immortal One knows all but can make mistakes ;) litst ( not Stacey ! ) PS: to Brenthomer : if you want motion blur, the technique we described can be a problem ...

It's almost finished, tell me what you think ! The clouds still need to be improved, but i think the earth is okay . The fun part in this procedural shader is that you can randomly generate worlds if you change some variables . And with the shader preview window, you can even generate a map ! By the way, when i export the file to .3ds, Carrara can't generate textures other than in 128x128 format . Does anybody have an explaination ? litst

Go check out a a shareware program called 3dexplorer...it will let you have TOTAL control over your exports..for what it does its amazing. I feel bad for useing it almost a year w/out regeristering yet but I will soon..its the greatest when it comes to that stuff. BTW: is your globe set up to actually randomly generate the landscape? What I mean is just b/c you change a seed value and you get a different landmass doesnt make it random..but I was wondering if you actually used some sort of mathmatical formula that produced a random result or if you where just changeing a seed value.

Brent ... nope, i didn't use any mathematical formula . I have to go into the shader tree to make seed changes . But it's still random ! I thought that the seeds were there to show to a random algorythm where to start ? My programming skills are very limited, i can be wrong ... And about 3Dexplorer ... There's a bunch of them ! Do you have any link ? Thanks . litst

Attached Link: http://www.xdsoft.com/

http://www.xdsoft.com/ this is the best one I have found..it does about everything and is updated a TON. As to what I was talking about before with randomness...I was wondering about the whole seed thing. This method of land generation has been in games since back in the games of Mule on the c-64. Its popular b/c if you change the seed from 500 to 900 and then back to 500 then 500 will stay the same. What the problem is, is that the worlds dont appear very diverse after you visit the first couple 100. I was just wondering if you found an actual random command like 6*(rnd)+1 for the formula modeler...I bet you could use something like that to generate some cool stuff.

Ah .. "rnd" I used that alot on my amstrad !!! In computer, there is no true random simulator ( except Win98 ;) . When you use a random algorythm, you got to tell it where to start . I remember the "randomize time" mnemonic in basic, wich used the actual time as the seed of the random algorythm . It was meant to give better hazard . I assume some procedural functions use seeds like that, and that the random algorythm is included in the shader function . When "shuffle" must be something like "randomize time", the seed allow the user to use the same random routine several times in different channels . Just a guess, any programmers around ? litst

And thanks for the link, i'm downloading the prog . If you find that procedural functions always give similar results, it's probably because the function is made to generate a certain shape .