VRay Earth

[ShaunDon]

Good morning, fellow rendermonkeys!

I'm working on a rendering of the Earth on the side. You know, expand my horizons sort of stuff. Anyway, please let me know what you think!

One problem I'm encountering is dealing with ridiculously large texture maps in Max, and I'm hoping someone here has the solution. This model is made up of multiple targas that exceed 16,000 pixels wide -- check out http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/ if you ever need awesome earth maps -- and I think I've reached some sort of limit.

I've got over 300 mbs of targas, and now I'm trying to add a higher resolution cloud map, but every time I try to load another one, I get a generic "Error Reading File" message. I assume I've reached some sort of memory threshold, but there's gotta be a way to get around it. I'm working on a P4 with 2g of RAM.

Thanks guys!

Shaun

[percydaman]

not bad but Id say it needs alot of work still. Id say if you haven't yet, look at some photos of earth of orbit to help you. Specifically your atmosphere haze looks a little large.

[ShaunDon]

Here's what I've been using as my primary reference.



I agree with you on the haze, I did that fairly quick in combustion. Definitely needs refining. But the clouds are really what seem to be killing my effort... but the only way I can load better maps is if I dumb down the maps I have for the surface, which I'm not willing to do since I'd like to be able to render a lot closer than this.

Shaun

[Da_elf]

ive dont a couple of earth rendenders and here are a few things.
a: there are quite a few maps for the earth. i suggest using most of them. try to to use the "3 maps in 1" type of thing. like keep the earth and cloud layer seperate.

b: night time is pitch black however there should be a city lights map as well. use that with a falloff map as a mask for a vray light material. the falloff map should be set to lighting instead of fresnel or any of those others. that way it will keep the lights on in the dark hemispheres only.

c: use the ocean specular mask maps. your bodys of water need some nice sun reflections.

d: if your adventurous enough use some displacement maps. ive done displacement maps on both land surface as well as cloud layer. the shadows you get on the coulds are really cool. especially in the twilight areas.

ps just looked at your rendering and noticed you did have specular areas. the brightness of afica was blinding me to it though hehe. somehow your render seems way too bright. with a seperate cloud layer you can get some cool shadows on the ground from clouds.

[ShaunDon]

Thanks for the advice, Elf! I actually have all those map layers prepped, and all but the clouds are 16,000 pixels wide... trying to boost the cloud now, but I think I'm going to have to make my own since I can't find anything that large on the net. As soon as I can get an image that big into memory in addition to the surface, spec, bump, and night maps.

I think you're right on the displacement of the clouds -- I've experimented a little with great success, but I also don't want them to appear too thick on the horizon. Still searching for the balance.

Shaun

[instinct]

you can get as big as you want to...actually bigger then you want to :P

the source for 90% of all the maps is available for free from the nasa FTP.

I grabbed the colour maps in full res for a project...that´s 43k x 21k no way max could load multiple of those from my experience...even had problems with all the 16k maps from space-graphics.com

Great link tho in your first post, didnt know that one.

Greetings,
Thorsten

[ShaunDon]

Thorsten, where do you go to access the NASA FTP? I looked there first before finding Celestia Motherlode, but I didn't have much luck finding maps.

Thanks!

Shaun

[instinct]

i´m not 100% sure but i THINK it was ftp://veftp.gsfc.nasa.gov/outgoing/bluemarble/

sometimes it´s full...but i managed to get the maps...note that they are in RAW format for highest possible quality and hence the eastern hemisphere alone is 1.3 GB unpacked

Thorsten

[ShaunDon]

Oh. My. God. I'm off to buy some more RAM now!

Much obliged, Mr. Instinct.

Shaun

[R2J2]

Thanks for the links guys, very usefull.

Shaun, if your having problems with large texture maps you can use the bitmap pager, customize>preferences>Rendering>Click on under bitmap pager

[vlado]

Another option, besides using the bitmap pager, is to simply split the large texture map into several smaller ones.

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

hmmm....somehow I feel the urge to post a wish in the wish list section, that the vrayimg format be used like the renderman tx, so you only load up the part you are seeing, and at an appropriate resolution. Wouldn't that be something. Then we could (somehow) convert the gigantic textures, and vray would load them appropriately.

[ShaunDon]

Christian -- I'd never used/read about the VrayMap material before, and that's exactly what I'd hoped it would be for until I read the manual. If it were possible to write a map material that only loaded the texture at render, that would be excellent. Perhaps one that would allow you to select a preview map and a render map, so you'd still be able to work with it in the mat editor. I tried adjusting the bitmap pager, but that only handles memory for maps at render, it doesn't help when max won't even load the map into the editor.

But until there is a large map option, I think Vlado's got the only solution. And that's fine for me -- if I'm gonna be this anal about texture resolution, I should have to do the leg work for it!

Thanks to all for the input. It's been extremely valuable.

Shaun

[Josele]

Another option, besides using the bitmap pager, is to simply split the large texture map into several smaller ones.

Best regards,
Vlado

... and how can I use that bitmap pager?