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Earth without post-processing

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blauwfilms:
Hello everyone,

For the past few years I've been making lots of Earth renders in a search for the most realistic setup.
This latest render is using my Earth Digital 3.13 project file (available on the Blauw Films website).

The planet uses a variety of 86K texture maps. The land and water shader are built up using these texture maps from chlorophyll maps to bathymetry maps. The texture maps have been manually cleaned up from the NASA image library.

The atmosphere was done with the Corona Volume and an Xpresso node setup that mathematically incorporates the Rayleigh Scattering formula into the color mixing of the volume layers. I'm playing with anisotropic direction to have the red-scattered light face the camera (sunset) and the more blue-scattered light go away from the camera (atmospheric glow). That gives the gradient of white light all the way to deep blue.

For the stars I'm using a 32-bit (hdr) star kit that we've developed for our sci-fi short film, Syntactic Labyrinths.

Would love to hear your thoughts :)

All the best, Leo

Beanzvision:
CGI! Earth is flat! :P

blauwfilms:
@Beanzvision as flat as a polygon ;)

pokoy:
Looks great. You've probably compared your renders to countless images of the real thing but one thing that sticks out for me is that land/forest appears too reflective. It might be the volumetric effect of the light scattering in the atmosphere but to me it looks like there's too little difference between sea/land reflectivity.
Some examples:
https://images.t3n.de/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/iss_suedostasien_erde_weltall.jpeg?class=structuredData-medium
https://www.woodtv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2024/02/NASA-MICHIGAN-MITTEN.jpg

Of course it all depends on the light source angle and I might be comparing apples to oranges but I'd expect landmass to be way rougher and less reflective or the sea to be more reflective.
Another thing looking slightly off is that the landmass colors seem to be slightly too saturated.

Still, good job overall, the blue hue of the atmosphere looks great and that one is really tough to get right.

blauwfilms:
@pokoy Thank you very much! Yes, that's a very good point. I definitely think you're right.
The land-mass has been quite tricky to get rough enough. Thanks for the references!
I'm increasing the Roughness a bit more now and I'm slightly lowering the IOR to get a stronger contrast.

The saturation is a good point too.
The images I've been using as reference have very different saturation levels. It's difficult to find a clear base-line and lots of them seem to be post-processed. I'm slightly decreasing the saturation to see what it looks like.

And thanks! The atmosphere colour was quite tricky, especially as it is created by "stacking" coloured volumes (R, G, Y, C, B, V).
With a little bit more tweaking I think I can get that "foggy" cyan in there as well.

Cheers!

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