Planetary night view [WIP]

[icosahedron]

Nice images.

A lot depends on how densely populated your world is and whether the map is meant to be a photographic image or an enhanced map.

A photo would have much less land detail:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/..._composite.jpg

and clouds wouldn't be seen, they would simply mask the lights.

If your map is an enhanced representation, rather than a photo, then you can have as much land/cloud detail as you want.

Some of your brighter areas of light seem to be too big and too bright in comparison with the Earth at night images I've googled, and your light distribution suggests that your continent interiors are uninhabited, despite the coastlines being very well populated(and perhaps too clearly delineated) the bright spot near the centre seems strangely isolated - no roads or towns linking it with the coast.

Hope that helps.

[kridenow]

The clouds rendering gives a rather hazy fog over the surface.
So, as suggested, I went (for the daylight view) with a photo of Earth clouds (now I found them, at some places, a bit "dirty grey").




I dropped the idea to include clouds on the night view. Yes, it would just hide the civilization lights.



(I've added a field of stars, picked from internet, for the best or the worst. But now I believe it's quite the worst
I also worked a bit on the gaussian blur to make the transition from lightside to darkside better looking)


The distribution of light was quite problematic to me.
The planet is completely fictionnal. I tried "extracting" a distribution of settlements (generating light) from the intermediate "lowland" layer.
(I have a base layer, which served for the oceans, tinted in blue, a "lowland" layer, tinted in shades of green and a "highland"/mountains layer tinted in white).

It's a selection by pixel color. The result excluded the oceans (which weren't on the layer) and the mountain (same reason).
Because settlements tend to be coastal, I picked a color by the "coast".

The end result was a rather large selection of pixel. When "illuminated" it made the whole planet rather luminous with much more lights, including inner lands.
But I found it being quite "too much" to my taste so I progressively excluded the darker (dimmer) pixels which led to the concentration we see now.

it would probably be better with another pass at population/light distribution, removing or lessening some bloats of light (they have an inner and external light), especially when there are lone and long luminous strings by coasts.

I'm also undecided on the final opacity of the global shadow. A darker shadow makes lights the obvious feature. On the other hand, it makes the whole... just dark

Pierre