[Video] Revolving Kerbin 3D Animated Video

[Radion]

I created this animation today as the introduction to an end-of-days scenario going through on the roleplay forums. The animation depicts Kerbin alone, no Mun in sight, revolving on its axis. Using material nodes I was able to make Kerbin transition from the daytime texture to the night city-lights texture. Using the daytime texture I also managed to create a bump map and specular mask to ensure it looked as realistic as possible, then added a cloud map (it's actually Earth's cloud map, courtesy of NASA) and a sphere with transparency with fresnel to add the blue atmospheric hue.

http://youtu.be/VX1HlzDywbI

The stars flicker though, which is an issue, seeing as this is supposed to be a space-shot, but that's just one of the things Blender does (and I hadn't the time to go through some of the ridiculous workarounds). It could use some music, or at least sound, but this is the preliminary I have.

[Thobewill10]

Very nice! The tutorials on blenderguru are great, aren't they?

Love the kerbol reflection.

[Radion]

Very nice! The tutorials on blenderguru are great, aren't they?

Love the kerbol reflection.

Yes, they are. I love 'em, Andrew Price is an excellent blender teacher, the things I learn I apply to other models of mine.

The Kerbol reflection was easy enough, all I had to do was recolor the specularity to red, then increase the intensity so that the center was white and the rest was red, as opposed to the red specularity that would occur with keeping the intensity level.

The compositor was a little tricky though, as the atmospheric glow effect would also cause the stars to look rather weird on some screens, but perfectly normal on others, so I just took it out.

[Thobewill10]

Well, nice work, and kudos on the hand-made spec, bump, and city light maps.

[Radion]

Well, nice work, and kudos on the hand-made spec, bump, and city light maps.

Thanks. The custom maps were a pain to make at times, but it paid off in the end. The only thing I wish I hadn't done was applying a Gaussian blur to the city light maps in Paint.NET, they look out of place in the video.

[Thobewill10]

I might also recommend, if possible, increasing the intensity of the glow. It's a bit faint.

[Radion]

I might also recommend, if possible, increasing the intensity of the glow. It's a bit faint.

The city light glow or the atmospheric glow?

[Thobewill10]

City light. Sorry; i should have specified.

[Radion]

City light. Sorry; i should have specified.

Perhaps, yes. The emit value on the night texture I intentionally lowered so it wouldn't be dominating the scene, but I guess it would be good to up it a bit.

[Vostok]

Looks very nice, there. If I were to make any suggestions I'd say that the clouds would follow the rotation of the planet. At the equator, you don't see the clouds overhead going past at around 1000 mph....

If you could find /draw out an animated cloudmap somewhere that would also make it look super-realistic. Apart from that though, awesome animation!

[Nikolai]

This is AMAZING. Thank you for sharing!

(Minor nitpick, and it's only if you care -- this animation gives Kerbal an axial tilt, which it doesn't have in the game.)

[XIRA]

they should add such clouds in ksp, looks amazing!

[whatisthisidonteven]

Looks great! I definitely agree that clouds ingame would make Kerbin look a lot more beautiful, like the one in this video.

[kerbalboy2000]

:):):)