Advanced real-time rendering

Detailed real-time Earth rendering

- Benoit Neil -

Page best seen at 1600x1200 resolution or more

The few images on this page are a excerpt from a bigger project I worked on, for Silicon-Worlds. One part of this project was Detailed real-time Earth rendering. Main features are:

Real-time rendering on a med-end PC (from a 1 GHz CPU + 64 Mo 3D video card)
Realistic rendering
- Specular highlight using cube map (Better look than using the Lambert model applied on vertices) affected by surface reflexivity
- Adaptive models (GeoMipMaps method)
- Adaptive detailed textures (40000x20000 pixels, roughly 12 GB of uncompressed data):
  - 4 texture units, at 24 bits per pixel (Day, night, reflexivity, normal map)
  - 1 unit at 32 bits per pixel (Cloud layer)
Multi-scale rendering in a scene graph (Ability to render very small object as well as huge ones, without depth-buffer issues such as z-fighting)
Integration and adaptation for a real-time rendering engine, partially using specific plugins

Note: images with a thin border have a higher resolution version available.

On the picture below, the generated image has no atmosphere. This why it appears less blueish and has a more visible specular highlight.

Rendering (without atmosphere) compared to a photography.

Adaptive texture: a zoom on Earth ('Daylight' texture only)

Initial version (8000x4000, roughly 92 MB per texture) compared to my project (40000x20000).

Other screenshots:

Detail of the normal mapping (Intensified effect for illustrative purposes)