Earth, Sun And Stars, Alan Hettinger (3D)

[ajay1589]

very realistic! It looks like u just shot out into space and took a picture!

[Hettinger]

Thanks - the geometry is obviously nothing much, but the lighting and textures took a lot of fine tuning to make it look realistic.

[Mortis]

Looks nice.. but I got one problem with your shot. Where is the atmosphere ? :)

[Ducimus]

Earth is very well done but your star field needs some variety...

Try reducing the amount of stars by creating large and smaller stars, erase some areas by adding paterns, and reduce the visibility of the stars closer to the sun...

Good job either way...

[zooyorkbmxer]

way too many stars but other than that it looks pretty cool =D
try making a satalite orbiting earth

[Hettinger]

way too many stars I don't know maybe a little bit of an exaggeration on my part, but I wanted it to look like there were zillions. I agree I could have spent more time with variety though.

[arona]

im sorry(for myself) but it doesnt look realistic to me at all :shrug:

[BigLarry]

I like it. For me it seems very realistic, but then again i'm not an astronomer.

Even though the geometry is 'simple' that doesn't matter at all, we should look at the picture not what polygons, etc make up the picture.

Perhaps there could be another layer of atmosphere between the viewer and the planet, it would be interesting to see what difference that makes.

*Aron - could you extrapolate on your comments, it would be more constructive if you added how it could be made more realisitc.

BigLarry

[leho]

earth map was taken from NASA? well you took the map with clouds too. you should make another material for clouds and atmosphere. little halo around the earth maybe ;)

[wybl]

Looks very cool. Add admosphere and a cloudlayer. And on the dark side of earth, there must be little lights vissible coming from big city's.

[Ro3d]

I agree with arona! Not realistic at all! Has anyone who is saying that it is realistic actually looked at a photograph of earth? Atmosphere?

[Thewiruz]

look at a real picture from earth,then you dont see a single star!Take Nasa photos for an example! But it looks nice indeed!!good work

[Hettinger]

Looks very cool. Add admosphere and a cloudlayer. And on the dark side of earth, there must be little lights vissible coming from big city's.
I like the idea about the city lights on the dark side. That would look really cool.

The clouds are on a separate sphere, and that's separated just a tiny tiny bit, but based on the photos I've seen, the hard edge looked more realistic to me than trying to add a ton of atmosphere. Look at this for example:

Earth Photo (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/a13_h_60_8588.gif)

As for the stars & sun, that's where I got a little surrealistic. I know that with the brightness of the earth and sun you wouldn't see that many stars in the background, but IMO they just looked like they fit there so I took a little artistic licence there. Sue me. :)

Thanks for all your constructive comments!

[TraceR]

Wow, great job on the picture! Very nice. I agree, it does need an atmospheric glow on the bright side. I have done this easy enough with halos. But it can also be done with ramp shaders. But I dont know what Maya has, so there are probably other ways to do it. Great overall picture though.

:thumbsup:

[SuperHal]

Night side needs help. See Earth at Night foldout from Nov. 2004 National Geographic. It is a composit of satilite images of cloud free nights.

[arona]

*Aron - could you extrapolate on your comments, it would be more constructive if you added how it could be made more realisitc.

BigLarry
ok these are what i think:
you said you like those stars for your purpose, but at least you can use some real photos to look more like stars instead of asphalt(probably :) ).
sun really doesnt suppose to be in that way, it looks more like a lamp, you can make another sphere for sun too, or use some right effects.
bump maps on earth doesnt look convincing. probably its a bit so much. on the other hand seems bump map of earth affects the cloud layer either?!(its visible at right-bottom of the earth). you can use some seperate bumps for cloud, i think good displacement map works nice.
and if you dont like atmosphere at least make some kind of haze and particles on earth, to show the distant and .... as we can see it in your refrence. the earth is clean in a way seems its right out of window.
this part is just somethings that i would do and not sure that is needed really or not:
changing the hues of earth map could be useful, to get rid of that green color all over it.
map resolution i think is a bit off either.
and at last manipulating the images are so important. probably adding some blue or purple color and ... .

:thumbsup:

[Aragorn26282]

Too much stars around the sun, it would be impossible to see them, and too much stars overall, it looks like a deep space picture. Maybe if it was a fantastic picture, with a uncertain planet in an uncertain solar system, it will be fine.

Anyway it's good, I'd like to be able to do it...

[visjes]

It depends what you're going for. Certainly if the Earth were visibly that dim (captured with a short exposure from a camera), the stars would also be underexposed and only a few would be captured (see: any video/photo shot from the surface of the moon). To our eyes, I believe the Earth would be very bright in space, as it reflects, on average, about 30% of the sun's light which hits it. I don't really have the numbers by me, but I suspect this would be brighter than, say, a street light. Indeed, the moon only reflects 12% of the sunlight which hits it, and we all know how bright that is (although its reflection is more-or-less constant, the Earth's is highly biased to snow and cloud covered areas, for obvious reasons). Take a look at the nearest street light. Notice the huge glow around it?

The "atmosphere" that is usually seen in artistic renderings of the Earth might also be interpreted as inherent glow or halo about it. A computer monitor cannot reproduce the kind of colour contrast that would be observed in reality, and at least not yet cannot auto-generate the glow one would expect.

The rendering is nice, however to have so many stars visible, I'd recommend first blocking out the area immediately around the sun, no stars will be seen at all, and also a gradiating halo around the Earth, as well as adding a nice glow to the Earth itself.

All in all a very nice render. :) I'm just being nitpicky. So glad to see another space art enthusiast.

[WannaLX]

Good picture,but A little fade i think,need more highlight^_^

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