Dr Dave

In Part 1 I showed some screenshots of a planet rendered using multiple effects. I'll discuss each of these in turn, and begin with a composite image to show how each effect contributes to the overall image.

Figure 1. Composite image showing per-pixel, single-direction lighting (top left), addition of bump-mapping and specular (Phong) reflection (top right), addition of atmospheric scattering (bottom left), and addition of clouds and cloud shadows (bottom right).

The first thing I needed to do was create a model. I could have used a predefined sphere, but chose instead to generate the mesh algorithmically so that I could easily control the number of vertices.

Texture

Once I had a model, the first thing I needed to do was to apply a texture. NASA has an extensive image library, and the Visible Earth site has a collection of land maps for Earth. These maps are Equidistant Cylindrical projections, so my texture coordinates were simply:

x = λ
y = θ

where

λ = longitude,
θ = latitude

Lighting

The Shader Series on the XNA Creators Club site is a great introduction to lighting. My initial lighting model was a simple per-pixel shader, with a single directional light source from the sun. I subsequently added specular reflection using a Phong shading algorithm.

Relief

In order to show surface features without significantly increasing the number of vertices in the planet model, bump (normal) mapping can be used. There are numerous sources of normal maps on the Internet, available in various formats (I'm using DDS), and a good sample of how to implement normal mapping in a shader can be found on the XNA Creators Club site.

Atmospheres

There are many discussions on the subject of atmospheric scattering, many of which reference the work by Nishita et al. The article "Accurate Atmospheric Scattering", GPU Gems 2, Chapter 16 by Sean O'Neil served as a good starting point and is available here.

Clouds

The Visible Earth site also has a collection of cloud maps. This texture is then rendered on another sphere model above the surface of the planet.

Shadows

It was an important effect to cast shadows from the clouds onto the surface, particularly toward the terminator where the shadows are longer and not directly below the clouds themselves. My first approach was to implement a sphere-ray intersection algorithm in a pixel shader to dertermine the surface position of a shadow cast from my cloud sphere, and subtract the result from the existing surface texture.