A new Earth

I know after my last post half of you lost all faith in me. Mark, you said, you seem to be totally lacking in talent and ability. That's a horrible planet!

Yes, yes it was. But I struggle ever onward against my disabilities.

I spent a couple of hours trying to fake up some good maps in Photoshop, but got nowhere at all.

It finally occurred to my to use Vue. I'd like to get some good out of it. So I created a simple landscape in Vue 6, and clipped off the bottom, giving me something like a group of islands sitting in the sea:



I applied a mountain texture to it, rendered it and saved it out for use as a map in Lightwave. Rendered up in Lightwave, it's a definite improvement over yesterday's effort, but the mountains look about 5,000 miles tall. A lot of that comes from the shadows rendered in Vue, but the texture is just too big.


So it was back to Vue to re-render the landscape with all the textures scaled down and with the sun directly overhead, so the mountains didn't cast those ridiculous shadows. Here's my second attempt, with some rough shading of the black oceans and a few spots of color thrown in for good measure:


And here's the resulting Lightwave render. Better. Closer. But still no cigar.


A little further tweaking of the lights, clouds and cameras, and we're actually getting close. That needs work, but it's 100x better than my first try.