Planet Earth Help

[TtnAtlas]

So I'm trying to get all the effects together for this web series I'm going to try and film in the next few months and I've already run into a problem. Most of the effects will be done in After Effects, but there are a few 3d elements that I'm going to need. The first is a model of the Planet Earth seen from space.

I know the very basics of Houdini, the panes, most of the tools, and how to do basic animation. But I could really use some help on this if anyone could give me a hand. I loved that Earth I saw that Miguel (blank) did and that's actually what drew me to odforce website and I looked around for it but only found it in the gallery. So if someone could point me there because I thought he had some tutorials on how to do that I would really appreciate it if it exists. if not please please help because all of my funds will be going towards costumes and props so I won't be able to get a special effects guy to help me out so it's all resting on me. Thanks

[Ezz]

Well I had to make an Earth seen from space some time ago in Maya, but the workflow is the same. First I did some search on Nasa`s blue marble site

to get textures in a high resolution. My renders was in 2K, so they had to be in a very high resolution.

Essential I did a render with 5 passes:

1) a constant shaded earth to make glow

2) a lambert shaded earth to to controle the glow

3) a beaty pass of the earth. Rember to map specular color to differentiate land and sea. Add bump/displacemnet where mountains are.

4) a cloudpass wich I displaced just a bit to get some shadoweffect.

5) a shadowpass.

Thats about that :-)

Also there is a ton of tutorials and threads on the web that covers the subject.

Hope it help.

Erik

Edited June 21, 2009 by Ezz