We also need a water surface mask (or landmass mask, depending on how you look at it). The brightness of the pixels in the elevation image represent altitude: The brighter the pixel, the higher the area it represents. Elevation image downloaded from Blue Marble.
#Terragen game island download#
We’ll download two files – a surface image and the elevation image. On the other hand, if we were rendering a 720HD video frame (1280×720) of the entire globe, the images could be resized to 2,048 pixels wide and there would be plenty of resolution to spare. On NASA’s image, this distance measures about 4,000 pixels – close enough but it means the image needs to be kept full-size. The area to be depicted stretches from West Papua to Tonga in the South Pacific. The required resolution is 300 pixels per inch, which yields a width of 5,100 pixels. In this case the rendering needs to be wide enough to cover a two-page spread in a print publication. To determine how large a scene’s texture files need to be, I start with the final rendering size and work backwards. (If my math is right, that yields a resolution of about 3.5 pixels per mile at the equator.) Individual tiles, each measuring 90 degrees latitude by 90 degrees longitude, are also available at the same size, 21,600 by 10,800 pixels. The main composites are 21,600 by 10,800 pixels and, as tiffs, clock in at over 900MB apiece. Earth surface image downloaded from NASA’s Blue Marble website. Other images, available at the same scale and resolution, depict topography (altitude), bathymetry (ocean depths), city lights, and cloud cover. The polar icecaps advance and retreat, and vegetation morphs from green to brown and back again. Most are surface image composites representing each month of the year. NASA’s Blue Marble web page, part of its Visible Earth catalog, includes many high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface. Which makes Terragen a killer app for building planets.įirst, we’ll call on NASA to gather some of the parts we’ll need.
Most often the point of view is at ground level, but it also can be placed out in space.
Among its many strengths is the ability to render natural-looking surfaces – land and water – and atmospheres and clouds. Terragen is a specialized 3D application used primarily to create landscapes. So when given the opportunity to try it with Terragen, I was curious to see how it would work out. The results can be convincing, but the process is involved – requiring several concentric 3D spheres with various types of surfaces and opacity to replicate landmass, ocean, atmosphere, and clouds. I’ve put together and rendered orbital views of Earth before, most recently in Autodesk Maya. A recent project required a view of the South Pacific as seen from Earth orbit.
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