Planetary Shadows

The November update of the Earthsim 2 Beta will feature the latest work we have done on shadows. We can showcase these on the soon to be released high res data set for the moon in all its cratery glory.

It is technically very hard to make real-time shadows work well on a planetary scale, its taken a while for all the code to really come together. Here are some some of the results from our work while we were testing on Saturn and Mars.

Here is a picture of a test moon that is completely shadowed



Our test moon casting a shadow spec on the surface of the planet. You can also see the shadows cast by the rings on the surface. (we still have work to do here on how the shadows interact with the planetary atmosphere)



Here you can see the shadow stretched out near the terminator



You can just spot the shadow hitting the rings



I like the shadows cast into Valls Marinaeris on Mars



Here is a sunrise sequence on Mars if you go to the album from this image.