I have never seen anyone achieve this and I want to make it so that the first you see is the universe with it’s beautiful stars and the camera pans to reveal the earth. The earth rotate slowly and the camera zooms in closely with very high detail and fly above north america at 10.000m above the ground until you reach sweden and then you do a complete zoom until you reach ground level.
I know it is probably very easy to make, but I have never created an animation like this in Blender. Would have been nice if anyone had a full tutorial for this.
What I have done. I have created a 3D earth from the Realistic 3D earth tutorial from Blender Guru. I have done an after effects earth zoom before in AE years ago, but the reason I do not like it because it looks so cheap and bad. Now I can do it much better using Blender and drone videos I have taken from very high elevation.
First of all- forums aren’t live chat, it’s been all of four hours since you posted your question. It’s quite normal for answers to take hours or even days, especially on Saturdays, not many people are active on weekends.
Second- if you want help, don’t be a jerk. Saying everyone here is a noob is not going to make people want to help you. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Lastly, what you want to do is actually extremely complicated, and it requires an extreme level of decimal precision that most 3D softwares don’t have, including Blender. If you want to do this in just one shot, you need to be able to have the same level of detail at 10,000 miles (52,800,000 feet) to “ground level”, which I’m going to assume is 100 feet or so. You’d need a minimum of 528,000 digits of precision per decimal to do this- this is an absurdly large amount of information.
If you’re willing to cheat and not do this in one shot, it’s possible, but there’s not a software out there that can maintain 528,000 points of decimal precision without trickery and cheating.
In simpler terms, if you have a 4K (4096) texture for your visible portion of the ground at the end, your earth will need a texture sized 2000000000 to not see any pixelization
This is possible if you use procedural texturing - Musgrave texture, named after the remarkable F. Kenton Musgrave, fractals infinitely, and is designed for this purpose. Drawback: it will not match the Earth and there is nothing you can do to make it so. You might be able to get close, but it will always be procedural- that is to say, random.
The game engine solution- level of distance+mip mapping. You can use textures so that you can match the Earth exactly. This will work exactly as it would in a video game- you’ll be able to see texture and object resolution changing as your distance changes. There is no way around this. You can’t maintain texture resolution (see my last post), so at some point, the texture resolution will change, and it will be more or less obvious.
The real solution, but it’s not one shot- using the cloud plane and other obstacles to cleverly hide transitions between shots. You go from space to the atmosphere (with clouds) in one shot, you use those clouds as the beginning of the next shot that takes you within city distance, and then you have some kind of obstacle and do it again. Like this:
Where each triangle is a camera. Obviously, this isn’t to scale.
These are your only three options, unless you want to re-write and re-compile Blender to allow for obscene amounts of decimal precision that your computer couldn’t handle anyway
Hey, thank you so much for this! This was a very well thought out answer! I absolutely did not want to do this animation in one shot. I was wondering on how to make it look as good as possible. I really appreciate what you wrote, and I am going to try the number 3 solution.
This day have been a disaster for me. I apologize for being rude.
Well yea, for my idea. I have not seen anyone yet how to do in what I described in my opening post.
I want to make it so that the first you see is the universe with it’s beautiful stars and the camera pans to reveal the earth. The earth rotate slowly and the camera zooms in closely with very high detail and fly above north america at 10.000m above the ground until you reach sweden and then you do a complete zoom until you reach ground level.
Again, use three or four shots cleverly planned and cut to look continuous. Essentially just take my diagram and curve the lines, by moving the planes underneath in the fourth dimension (time) relative to the camera it’s easier to do than to describe, honestly
Thanks again! I am having troubles with the camera. It just started to give me trouble and I do not know why.
I have set the focal point to 250mm, clip start to 0.001 and end to 250000m. I wanted to do a short animation from a far where the planet is small and to where its bigger. But I cannot zoom in or out sometimes even though the camera is not locked to any view, and I have to open another 3D viewport because one gets bugged all the time. It is frustrating!
This is what I did and it used to work, but not anymore. I get into perspective mode. Zoom out to see small earth. I press ctrl - alt - 0 to lock the camera to that view. Then I press i and choose visual location to my time line. I proceed in perspective mode to a closer view and set camera to ctrl - alt - 0 and choose visual location. Somehow it does not work at all. The camera is not listening to my commands many times. It feels like im going insane. This has never happened to me before, but I have never tried doing an animation or zooming to objects from a far.
Just wanted to say I fixed this problem I had. I did not know you had to only press ctrl - alt - 0 once. Then you can zoom and keyframe the animation. I thought you had to do it each time you changed position. This confused me lol.
I shouldn’t have been so harsh either. Let me know if you have any more questions!