Good Night Earth Dream

My new render of the Earth

Sunday, October 14, 2007 by TheMasterBaron | Discussion: Animated Wallpapers

I thought I would preview my new render of the Earth. It's going to take 3 days to render the entire rotation of the earth in the one minute video, so I was hoping for some feedback before I let it run for the entire 3 days.

The dream will be one minute long and will follow the sunrise around the Earth.

EDIT 10/16/07: Changed the view to have space on top left and flow the morning around.
EDIT 10/19/07: I think I got the atmosphere done and lowered the altitude of the clouds


Thanks,
Master Baron
39 Reply 152 Referrals
First Previous Page 2 of 2 Next Last
TheMasterBaron
Reply #21 Wednesday, October 17, 2007 4:42 PM
For the whole animation or a still?! I hope it is for the whole animation, hehe. Welcome to CGI! I have a 12 CPU render farm behind my sofa.

Yes, entire render. 12 CPUs, very nice! I have a old dual processor P3 733 PC, but not sure how much time impact it would have on the rendering time.

Seriously though, you might want to check you anti-aliasing settings

Your right, I have AA all the way up. I'm getting lots of flicker from the bump mapped mountains that anti-aliasing seems to fix. I haven't spent time finding a happy medium yet. But I'll play with it before doing a full video render.

Thanks and your comments are very helpful!

Master Baron


Excalpius
Reply #22 Wednesday, October 17, 2007 5:48 PM
There may be a "threshold" setting for anti-aliasing if it is "adaptive" in your renderer. You should be able to set it to "focus" on the high-contrast (re: bump mapped) areas while ignoring the flat simple texture mapped areas. Perhaps a 3DSMax forum would be the best source for those specifics, since I'm using terminology from other renderers, but that's the general idea.

Intri
Reply #23 Thursday, October 18, 2007 9:23 AM
Good, the updated image is much better. But still - do you think you could be able to make the atmosphere border a little transparent? I think transparency would make it look even more realistic.

TheMasterBaron
Reply #24 Thursday, October 18, 2007 12:42 PM
do you think you could be able to make the atmosphere border a little transparent?

Thanks Intri, I'm still tweaking it and I'll be posting a final shot in the next day or so.

TheMasterBaron
Reply #25 Friday, October 19, 2007 8:04 PM
Thanks everyone, I think I got a final product to render.

Excalpius
Reply #26 Friday, October 19, 2007 8:57 PM
Cool, looking forward to seeing the results. Good luck with the baking.

Jamey Davis
Reply #27 Saturday, October 20, 2007 4:21 PM
I cannot wain to see how nice this will lokk, Thanks for all of your hard work....it really looks ike it will pay off!  

Pugboy
Reply #28 Monday, October 22, 2007 6:58 PM
I can't wait!!! I love all of the dreams that have a view of the earth... This could the dream that stays on my desktop for all of eternity!

viking396
Reply #29 Sunday, October 28, 2007 11:58 AM
All I can say is I can't wait! I love Eart dreams, space dreams and nature dreams. Now if only the Nvidia drivers would become more stable, that would be nice too.

ShelbyGT_The_Car
Reply #30 Sunday, October 28, 2007 1:23 PM
Is this the dream you are referring too?
WWW Link
If it is I already have this. Or is this to be a better version of the same such or type of dream.
It is the one and only dream I like. So if yours is better count on me buying it!

SGT

Pugboy
Reply #31 Sunday, October 28, 2007 2:29 PM
Is this going to be a Master Skin?

Oh yeah, did you start a render yet?

TheMasterBaron
Reply #32 Thursday, November 1, 2007 5:09 PM
Is this the dream you are referring too?

I haven't purchased this dream and there are no previews or screen shots other than the one on the purchase page so I don't know if it can zoom in get a horizon type view.

Is this going to be a Master Skin?

I haven't decided yet, but leaning to yes. I've put many hours into this one. Some of my dreams will be Master Skins and some will be free. I will try and make more free ones than Master Skins.

Oh yeah, did you start a render yet?

I've just got back from vacation and it finished while I was away. My first attempt at making a WMV file has produced a 378MB WMV file! I will begin to work the file size down to something reasonable and hopefully I will be able to produce something in MPEG2 form.

Thanks,
Master Baron

Sky_YYZ
Reply #33 Wednesday, November 7, 2007 7:51 PM
Master Baron,

I appreciate your work, don't get me wrong. But on October 14th you gave hint of 3 days to render. I've been checking back every couple of days for almost a month, only to find out you just returned from holidays. Now, if I understand correctly, you want to charge for this awesome looking render. Until your latest post I didn't know that. I will not be checking back. Not because it sounds like you are planning to charge for your work so much as I feel you've left us hanging for quite some time already and I've lost interest on a personal level.

Good luck with your work. I don't doubt you will be financially successful as it appears it is going to be a beautiful dream.

Jay

TheMasterBaron
Reply #34 Wednesday, November 7, 2007 8:49 PM
I feel you've left us hanging for quite some time already and I've lost interest on a personal level.


Sorry about that, it took a week to render, (It finished while I was on vacation) and that was after lots and lots or tweaking. The problem is that while a single screen shot looked good, when I animated it flickered like crazy. It took awhile for me to find the right settings to get a good animation. And because it was so slow to make just a few seconds, it was a long process.

Since my last post I had to convert the final render (24GB in size) to MPEG2, and again, lots of tweaking to find a good balance between quality and file size. I'm not an expert at 3DS Max and MPEG2 encoding so it's been a lot of trial and error for me.

Now, today I'm working on slowing the rotation down as it's too fast.

Basically, I didn't anticipate how slow 3D rendering and how large the files would be and it's taking me days to do things that normally took hours.

Master Baron


ALMonty
Reply #35 Wednesday, November 7, 2007 9:05 PM
24GB in size


  I'd download that just out of curiosity.

stephenvw
Reply #36 Thursday, November 8, 2007 5:32 AM
yeah, you download that. I live in Belgium. I only can download 10gig in a month (we still got limits to our download) so this would take 3 months without doing something else. Belgium internet sucks.

Pugboy
Reply #37 Thursday, November 8, 2007 8:10 PM
24 gig is a lot... How are you going to turn it into a ~100 MB dream?

TheMasterBaron
Reply #38 Thursday, November 8, 2007 9:30 PM
The 24GB is the uncompressed 1920x1200, 30fps, 2 minute, render result. It amazing how big an image is when no compression is applied. I did get it down to a 112MB MPEG2 but at a 1152x720 resolution. The best part is that it still looks damn good. I hope to see it up on the site pretty soon.

ShelbyGT_The_Car
Reply #39 Thursday, November 8, 2007 10:10 PM
Sounds good! 112 mb thats small compared to the 24gb size.
Ready to give it a try here...
SGT

Please login to comment and/or vote for this skin.

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

  • Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums and downloading skins.
  • Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
  • Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
  • It's simple, and FREE!
Login
First Previous Page 2 of 2 Next Last

Home | About | Privacy | Upload Guidelines | Terms of Service | Help
Copyright © Stardock Corporation. All Rights Reserved.


web-wc01