Earth Clouds

[aaron-marine]

Hi, I am building the planet earth as seen from a satelite view. So far the render looks great with the high res earth texture map I have, and Im sure it would be dead on if we knew the planet didnt have any clouds or fog layers. Aside from my earth texture map, I also have a cloud texture map that is a high res, grayscale bitmap image (darker areas being spots of more transparency). How would I go about puting that cloud texture on top of the earth texture? Or better yet, how would I create a new material to put on a new sphere that has the texture as an alpha mask?

[aaron-marine]

nevermind ive got this haha. i just created a new material using the texture map as a color/transparency. and then just adjusted the alpha attributes on the texture. then i created another sphere on top of my earth texture giving it the new cloud texture and it looks fantastic. i'll probably post an image from my final render up here when im finished with it.

[slick]

Would be good if you could post an image. I assume you use one of these 16000x8000 pics from earth?

[user_deleted]

Hi whitecrow I too am planning a project involving the earth, my company is hiring a helicopter to zoom out from ground level to the height of the helicopter, then cg is taking over to zoom out to satellite level. I was wondering where the best res images are available from, free or purchased, the best i could find a couple of years ago were 2400x1200 as seen here: www.vexfilm.com/invasion2

Do Nasa sell images?

thanks
sam

QUOTE(whitecrow1 @ 12/11/06, 07:46 AM) [snapback]254565[/snapback]
Hi, I am building the planet earth as seen from a satelite view. So far the render looks great with the high res earth texture map I have, and Im sure it would be dead on if we knew the planet didnt have any clouds or fog layers. Aside from my earth texture map, I also have a cloud texture map that is a high res, grayscale bitmap image (darker areas being spots of more transparency). How would I go about puting that cloud texture on top of the earth texture? Or better yet, how would I create a new material to put on a new sphere that has the texture as an alpha mask?

[slick]

These 16kx8k where free to download (don't know if they where free to use in commercial projects), also included an alpha map and a cloud map (greyscale). Maybe they are still on the web (years ago i dled them). Here for example is a 6k image of earth.

[joojaa]

Less is more. That is to say a plate thats going to be 2k or less shoudl not use textures bigger than 4k. Youll just end in a filtering hell.

[slick]

Sure, but at the beginning of zoom out you have close shots of earth so for this a part of a high res pic is preferable.

[joojaa]

Even so you don't actually need a huge map (you can put maps within maps you know so you only have high res where you zoom in)