Center for Geospatial Analytics,
North Carolina State University
Vertex
Edge
Face
Image credit: Mushrooms by John Wrbanek
Surface
Volumetric
Displacement
Diffuse
Glossy
Transparent
Emission
Glass
Mixed
Diffuse + Glass
Satellite image used to create surface color
render
Elevation image used to generate surface roughness
render
Alpha map of oceans used to extract land features
render
Satellite imagery of lights used to illuminate the surface
Render
Satellite imagery of the clouds
The sphere object and the light source
Rendering of the cloud sphere
Rendering of the cloud & earth spheres
Spotlight
render
point
render
sun
render
Platform | Interaction design capability | Realism | Web AR/VR | Realtime GIS data integration | API | License | Domain hosting |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ArcGIS | full | medium | -- | yes | JS, HTML | Proprietary | No |
CesiumJS | full | low | -- | yes | JS | Apache 2.0 | No |
Sketchfab | limited | high | VR | -- | HTML | Proprietary | Yes |
Blend4web | full | high | VR | no | HTML CSS JS Python | GNU V3 | No |
Mapbox | full | high | full | Yes | Python JS C# | Proprietary | Yes |
Environments attributed to five editors
3D viewport
Outliner showing Camera, Cube and Lamp objects
Python console
Render options
Object attributes
Material attributes
Texture attributes
Designing complex photorealistic material
Node tree with shader and output nodes, parameters and links
Initial mesh
5mil faces, 5GB memory
Decimate to %50
2.5mil faces, 3.6GB memory
Decimate to %10
500K faces, 2.2GB memory
Initial mesh
After medium smoothing
After high smoothing
Blender Sculpt tool Brushes
Initial mesh
Refined mesh using Inflate, Flatten and Smooth brush
Blender Texture Paint tool
Initial mesh
Refined texture using clone brush
Wire shader blended with UAV RGB texture
Scene Camera is following a circular curve to create the animation (100 frames 10fps)