I knew that the first thing I had to figure out, was a way to get the texture for the nightside to show up, when there was no light. Luckily Cinema 4D has a shader called ‘Proximal’, that creates a gradient-ramp whenever a selected object is within a certain range of the shader.
The globe had two shaders. 1. The earth texture – standard diffuse / color 2. The nighttime lights – alpha channel with just the lights

For the effect to work, I needed a way to control the Proximal shader, and so I added a Null Object to the scene and set the Proximal-shader to react to it. Then I placed the Null Object over the globe and eyeballed where the nighttime was supposed to be.

This gave me nighttime texture, with overlayed lights. This is clearly wrong. :)

I had to use the proximal shader as the alpha channel for the daytime texture, and thereby showing the nighttime texture, where the sun didn’t shine ;)

Fusion Shader with proximal

This resulted in a much better image :)

But seeing as the null objects and the lights are codependant, I thought: “Why not make it so that I can rotate these things, and simulate a day?”

I grouped the Null Object that affected the Proximal-shader, the Sun light and the Moon-light to a Null and voila, I could now rotate the scene around, and the daytime and nighttime lights would align perfectly. Magic!

Earth rotation from chrleon on Vimeo.

This looks great, I think, but there was something missing :) Space is not empty. The final video is below. With audio and downloadable from Vimeo.

Rotating Earth – v2 from chrleon on Vimeo.

Leave your feedback down below and enjoy it :)

Licensed with Creative Commons: By – Share-Alike – Non-Commercial

Other credits:
Textures for Earth, Clouds and Nightlights from NASA ‘Blue Marble’ earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Audio from freesound.org
Radio Interference
by cognito perceptu

Brown Noise
by Bliss

Russian National Hymn from Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Russia -

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