Today I spent time refining the POV view of the globe from a satellite. To be specific, the ISS. The basic view started like this:
Very boring. The globe at night! One can barely even discern the horizon. It is where the stars stop. That's it.
Adding an atmosphere shader got me a layer of gas. The atmosphere shader is a ray march with a simple rayleigh phase function:
As I mentioned in the last update, I'm still not happy with the atmosphere layer, but it at least reacts to the presence of sunlight, lighting up before dawn.
Switching on the "4k" globe texture instead of the dim "no distractions" texture, things are starting to look better:
But there is no cloud layer and the specular highlights on the ocean are unsatisfying. I had ocean specular highlighting on the globe when viewed from a distance so this confused me, where had it gone? tricks used at one distance rarely work well when the camera is close. So after playing around, I managed to recover the specular highlight:
So now we are starting to see something better. The sun bounces off the ocean. I can dial it up until it really glares. Sunrises and sunsets start to look better.
(Side note: webgl2 should actually support HDR. I've seen one (exactly one) good HDR particle demo that runs on chrome. HDR looks amazing when it works. Since HDR seems half baked in browsers, I put it into the too-hard basket for now. Even caniuse does not know what you mean when you say "caniuse HDR webgl". Despite being an idea since 2021, adoption is glacial. A recent discussion is here: https://discourse.threejs.org/t/true-hdr-color-support/78370 )
Turning on the cloud layer now. Most critically, making sure cloud shadows are working wrt. the sun gave more of a 3d effect. This the final result:
Sometimes it looks pretty good in motion with the bright sun glare effects off snow and some lighter coastal waters and cloud drop shadows.
To get anything close to correct physical rendering is a deep rabbit hole especially when it also has to work at different camera distances. I should stop.
A real ISS picture of the horizon is so much better. Looking at reality vs the sim again perhaps the specular glint color should be more gold and less blue? Ok maybe I can play with it a bit more...
Top comments (0)