| Submitted by , posted on 12 February 2001 |

Image Description, by Whilst there isn't much here that's particularly spectacular code wise, I just thought this looked rather nice. This shot shows off the new shader code in my 3d modelling program, Clayworks (www.clayworks3d.com). It's a bit tricky to see in this shot but the sea and rivers of the earth exhibit specular reflection whilst the ground does not; it looks rather neat from glancing angles. The cloud layer is just another sphere sitting around the earth (I know it's a bit too high up). The diffuse lighting model is slightly modified from the standard function to give a sharper difference between the light and shadow of the earth. I used an exponential function to give the impression of a long camera exposure to achieve this effect. The standard diffuse model just doesn't look right for planets hanging in space.
Later, I hope to be able to generate the terrain data procedurally (and hopefully add greater detail levels when zooming down on the planet using a pseudo random number generator) and blending the ground terrain from a set of textures tuned for terrain type, altitude, weather and latitude so that equatorial regions have nice turquoise water and more temperate climes have the familiar grey-blue stuff that I'm used to.
Tim

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