I have a little bit of work left to do on this one. Using NASA earth data I’m trying to recreate a ISS flyover of New Zealand. I think I’m nearly there with the main models and textures, as well as the atmosphere. I just need to spend some time working on the colour grade and animation, maybe play with the clouds a bit!
Having tried a render of the entire planet, I wanted to see what I could so with just one little part of it.
Using NASA earth library I extraced all of the terrain data for New Zealand and created two seperate textures to use in Houdini. One for displacment, and another for colour information. This data was applied selectively to a large sphere. I wanted the camera to appear to be close enouught so that you would reasonably be able to notice the displacment of tall mountains although I may have taken some liberties to exentuate the effect.
Using a sattelite image of clouds I overlaid the texture data onto a grid and using the whites of the clouds as an occulsion mask was eble to extrude the louds downwartds to give them a little depth allowing them to cast shadows.
For the atmosphere I scaled a copy of the opriginal sphere up slightly, extuded it inwards and converted it into a fog VDB object to give the atmosphere a slight glow.
In the texturing stage I made sure that certian areas were more reflective than others, namely any water (Oceans lakes and rivers) but also snowcapped mountains. I had a spotlight postitoned where the sun appears in the image bit I also created a sphere to stand in for the sun itself and gave it a bright white texture, this allowed me to apply bloom in post, completely blowing it out, but giveing the apperaance of a realisitc sun.