A friend,@BrokenPoly challenged me to create a realistic render of Earth.

The first thing I did was to got to NASA, and their Earth Observatory and get real high resolution textures.

I downloaded textures for day and nighttime, since I wanted to create a partialy lit planet, and a set of clouds to make it more interesting.

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 -

godkjent av kilde/approved by source: agit8

- – - Cut from agit8 – - -

While developping our (AGIT8) latest project we encountered a bug in the Flash IDE that caused us many headaches and woes. Our project was setup in the Flash IDE with assets and files located in subdirectories, nothing fancy. Right on the last day of production, suddenly after a particular commit , our project would no longer compile. Flash would return the standard compiler error: “A definition for the document class could not be found in the classpath, so one will be automatically generated in the SWF file upon export.” The document class is in the same directory as the FLA! What in god’s name is going on!

It turns out Flash is not able find any classes in the project’s directory. Even when creating a new FLA file with a classpath entry to the project’s directory ; the compiler would just refuse to find ANY classes in that particular directory.

After about a day of investigation, we isolated the problem to OSX, as PC checked out working copies of the project would function properly. We also found out that by doing a subversion “EXPORT” of the project (basically removing the .svn files from the project dir) the project would magically start working again.

After another day of headaches and stress we finally figured it out. It seems that under OSX ONLY, if you have a directory in your classpath that is under subversion control (has .svn files) and that any one single directory has over 128 files subversionned, it will make the flash compiler class lookup fail silently and stop. You’ll get the usual compiler error messages for unfound classes.

The solution?

Make sure that no single directory in your project has over 128 files in it under subversion control. If you have one, simply segment it into sub directories and commit.

- – - end blatant copy – - -

Problemer du kan støte på underveis:

1. ./apachectl -S gir en bus error
2. Kan ikke koble til localhost
3. Error i syntax

1. Bus error

Dette kan være mye. Det jeg har erfart er at det noen ganger mangler en innstilling i httpd.conf filen som sier hvilken fil serveren skal lete etter som startfil (index.htm/index.php/index.html)

2. kan ikke koble til localhost:

Dette betyr at serveren ikke klarer å koble seg til den adressen du har oppgitt. Bruk porter over 1024 i OS X. Jeg bruker fra 3000 og oppover. Du kan også på Mac gå til Verktøy > Nettverksverktøy og klikke på Port Scan for å se om noen programmer på maskinen bruker portene du velger. Da velger su 127.0.0.1 i feltet ‘Oppgi en Internett- eller IP-adresse for å søke etter åpne utganger’ og haker av ‘Test kun utganger mellom’ og skriver inn 3000, 3100 i de to feltene. Du vil da få opp alle programmer som bruker port 3000 – 3100. Mest sannsynlig ingen.

3. Error i syntax

Her er det viktig at filer faktisk finnes At du fører DocumentRoot-banen inn i anførselstegn. DocumentRoot “/Bane/til/fil” Du trenger ikke / etter siste mappenavn.

Husk at httpd.conf filen er case-sensitiv, dvs at den skiller mellom små og store bokstaver.

4. Siste tips

Legg alle Virtual Hosts i egen fil, eksempelvis conf/vhosts.conf, og legg inn en ekstra linje i httpd.conf som henter inn denne filen Include conf/vhosts.conf

Reserve spiss for Wacom-penner

I viskelæret på wacom-pennen min ligger det en extra spiss, som selvfølgelig brukes til å lese av hvilken styrke man bruker til å tegne med, men dersom du har en ødelagt wacom penn, så er det greit å vite at du har TO reserve spisser i den ødelagte pennen, ikke bare en.

Ikke bruk Unicode UTF-8 NO-BOM, då blir det noen feil med æøå. Bildet viser innstillingene i TextWrangler fra BareBones Software.

Her er det satt i TextWrangler

På mac blir dette litt trøblete, så da kan du bruke TNEfs Enough fra JoshJacob.com eller en webutgave av programmet. Ikke bruk webutgaven om du forventer at det er sensitive filer i eposten!