Planetary night view [WIP]

[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