Globe texture with ability to shift land/sea colors and blur edge between?

#1

Looking for simple / fast rendering way to apply a simplified globe texture to a sphere. Just 2 colors, but want to be able to automate those colors independently, and apply a blur to the edges.

I tried “Earth” option in surfaces, but it appears to just be random shapes, and not actual continent shapes.

My first thought is to put two materials on a sphere where the first is just an ocean color, and the second is an alpha of the continents so that each material can have it’s color separately animated… then use the blur offset for the continent texture in the alpha to blur the edges.

All those blur options seem to be pixelating the edges, though, and not sure if there’s a more efficient approach in general.

#2

Yes, go with a black and white mask for the opacity/alpha of the land and sea, but the problem will be the blurring. As youve discovered, the only blur setting is a super cheap crappy box blur.

The only thing which springs to mind would be to pre-blur the black and white mask to the maximum blur level you need in photoshop, then in C4D you could use the contrast setting of the filter shader to crisp the texture back up.

#3

OK, thx.

Worth making a few attempts to get this right since it looks like for my purposes, pre-blurring a few textures gives a “good enough” rough impression of DOF while cutting the render time by roughly 3/4.