A Photorealistic Earth

One of the most complicated shader types in cg are the earth shaders. Although there are only a few 3d spheres with textured surfaces and one sunlight you have to choose unlimited opportunities to design a performant, realistic and detailed scene of the earth, the moon and the sun. There are many different techniques and material properties to design an earth surface model – realistic or abstract. I’ve created a photorealistic earth & moon shader for V-Ray Renderer based on the NASA Blue Marble Earth Maps. You can download this modelsĀ here.

How to bring your 3d models from 3ds max to the browser

This tutorial shows us a simple method to export 3d meshes from 3ds max to an own Javascript file format. We save a 3d-Mesh including textures and UV mapping from 3ds max using MaxScript and load them into a lightweight WebGL-Engine.

PFlow Script Operator: Particles follow Splines

Unfortunately there is no Spline-Operator for Particle Flow in 3ds Max and Path-Follow SpaceWarp don’t work with the Force-Operator in PFlow. So we need a particle flow script to control the position of each particle with splines. Here is my solution of this problem.