Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> I am happy to announce the opening of a new website showing realistic
> Earth surface renders made by me with POV-Ray:
>
> http://earth.imagico.de/
>
> (i did quite some testing if everything works and looks all right in
> various browsers.  If you find something not working correctly i would
> like to know it of course).
>
> Christoph

WOW!  These are absolutely .. uhm....

[EagleSun spins a wheel that contains a bunch of adjectives on it, after a
quick spin, it slows down and finally stops on the word "phenomenal".]

These are absolutely PHENOMENAL!

I'm excited seeing these images, and there's one in particular that I'm
looking at... the Himalayas.  You had to have gotten some Blue Marble data
(right?).  And I've been working on these kinds of renders too... and I
also experimented rendering Himalaya scenes... though I have limited my
testing to smaller maps.

How did you do the atmospheres?  I find the atmosphere to be the most
difficult, and I suspect POV-Ray is not good at rendering atmospheric
half-heights... after years (yeah I know that's too long) of tweaking and
researching atmospheric properties, I still don't think I'm there yet.
When I try to make it thick enough to show fading in lower altitudes and
clear in higher altitudes (like in Himalayas), I get white-outs.  When I
try to reduce white-outs, I get atmosphere that's too thin.  When I use
"sphere" formula, it's just not realistic (in fact it's wrong).  When I try
something that seems right, my cutoff into space is cut off too soon, so you
see a harsh boundary between atmosphere and space.... my list of
difficulties go on.

And that's why I appreciate seeing your pictures.

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