Cheating on textures

I'm working on one of the opening shots of the animation right now, one that features the classic 'pull out into space shot.' You know the one, the camera starts in looking down on a landscape and then pulls rapidly back to view the planet from outer space, usually passing through some convenient cloud banks on the way, to hide the joins in the footage.

The joins are necessary because any textures of sufficient resolution for the close-up would be ridiculously huge if you expanded them to cover the entire planet.

The pull-back was really suffering from the low-resolution textures I was using so I found a terrifically huge photo composite of the earth's surface. In fact, it was so big I could barely open it in Photoshop and Lightwave just threw up its hands.

I made a 50% version - still 10,000 x 5,000 pixels and rendered some tests and it looks better but, dang, that's a big texture.

My plan now is to cheat. Since only half of the earth is ever seen illuminated in this shot, I'm creating a version of the map that only covers half the earth, then repeating it twice. So if you looked where India should be, you'd find North America, instead. But you can't see that side so I'm gonna go for it.

I've actually done the same thing with the primal earth; to increase the apparent resolution of the texture, I'm just using it twice.

As the camera passes behind the earth, I want the nightside city lights to be visible, then slowly change into glowing volcanoes as the camera comes around the other side, at which point we've gone back in time to primordial earth.

I wasted a lot of time trying to get the nighttime 'light' maps and the daytime texture maps to combine on a single earth before I gave up and decided to do it in post.

I rendered a pass of the earth, then a pass of the earth with no sunlight and the light map applied, then a final pass of the primal earth. All three shots used the same camera setup.

Finally, in After Effects I placed the night time pass over the daylight pass, in Lighten mode, so the lights only show where the daylight pass was in shadow.

I laid the primal earth pass on top of those two, again in lighten mode.

I clipped the daylight pass while the entire planet was in shadow, so it is hidden before daylight reappears at the end of the shot. And it was as painless as that.

Fix it in post, that's my new motto.