Hello and thanks for your time,

I’m setting up a classic scene in which a satellite is orbiting around the Earth, upper atmosphere and the blue Earth with detailed clouds can be seen. (Think of a NASA space shuttle orbiting Earth and in the background is a large blue Earth, with the edge of the Earth against space apearing sightly curved and almost straight.

So I know I need the good-old NASA texture maps, and they are fine but I find the cloud detail is not good enough. That is, even when I use the highest resolution cloud maps and place it on a geo-sphere and render a close-up scene, the clouds break up, or pixelate, or generally do not look convincing. From far away, the render of the Earth as a blue sphere looks great, but in close-up views, the texture maps of the clouds, and even the Earth break up.

How can I create detailed maps of clouds to make for a realistic close-up view of Earth? Depth and thinkness, even shadows to the clouds.
Is this a material question, or maybe a modeling or special effects question?
I dont know, any tips on this?

K

XP Pro x64 SP2.
Xeon Quad Core x2 @ 2.33GHz, 4Gb RAM, 4Gb Swap, DX9.0c.
NVidia Quadro FX 4600 768MB
Forcewear 97.68

Outdated gear

I never tried this, but it’s just an idea I might try. Use Particles, placed by the cloud texture map, you can do this with Pflow. The particles could have some kind of procedural cloudy opacity map. So they would take the density from the shape of your Nasa cloud map, but have their own procedural opacity.