Earthsim

Earthsim 2011 Review

2012-01-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Here is a video of whatwe worked on through 2011

Looking back I amhappily surprised by how much we got done.

Our next step is toupgrade the 2D GUI system to a 3D one that fully integrates with the3D world.

The 2D GUI we have beenusing in the beta has always been a place-holder for us, so I'm veryexcited to move to the final system. We simply call this the 3DUI andit completes the Earthsim Universe browser as a fully fledged 3Dzooming user interface or 3DZUI

Once this is completewe can rapidly start adding new editing features to let you changemore of the world. We will enable everyone with an Earthsim accountto make and save changes into their own accounts and even create yourown 3D spaces and documentaries about them.

At the same time wecontinue to improve the content within the Earthsim Universe itself.We are still heading toward the next major content milestone ofincluding all the 700+ discovered exoplanets in the EarthsimUniverse.

And the great music isfrom the album Internal, by Jamie Catto and Alex Forster, its due outin September on Sounds True USA. otherwise gotohttp://www.jamiecatto.com

Water On Mars

2011-12-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a video I just made showing how a sea would cover the surface Mars. It is interesting to watch what happens as the sea level changes and the surface features that brings out.

In the latest beta version of Earthsim we have added an experimental Planet Editor. Over the next year this will be changed quite a bit as we add a more physically correct model of planets.

Right now you can change some of the basic rendering settings for the planet data. In future we will let you change physical parameters for a planet and then run the simulation to see what happens.

The goal here is to let you set-up a physically correct planet with an atmosphere to let Earthsim calculate temperatures and rainfall on the surface of the planet. This then will allow a simple biome simulator to grow of kill life on the surface. This also allows for much more realistic surfaces to be generated for a planet as grasses, trees and plants will know where they can grow.

And here are the latest high res screen shots of Mars. Watch full screen or zoom into the pictures they are captured at 2048x1152.

Mars

High Res Earth

2011-12-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

The new high res earth is live in Earthsim ! It looks fantastic. Here is a new earth album of very high res screen shots.

Earth

We have a host of other data improvements to the Moon and Mars as well as a basic experimental planet editor in. The planet editor is going to get much richer in future versions.

You can add a sea to the Moon or Mars or even the moon in the Epsilon Eridani system. I'm working on a video to show you this too.

Saturn Images

2011-09-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

Today I was taking a look again at the moons of Saturn to consider which we should upgrade next. It was looking very pretty so I uploaded some new high res screen shots to the Saturn album.

I also made a new video while taking the images. It looses a lot compared to the real thing (the video compression and lower resolution reduces the quality)

Here is the full photo album. Be sure to watch in full screen for best effect.

Saturn

Here are a few of the images from it.

From Saturn

High Res Earth

2011-09-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

We have upgraded the resolution of the Earth data in Earthsim to 90M. Adding a minimum of eight times the data we used to have to the Earth. Some areas are at 10M resolution, I will post more about where to find these later.

You get to see some amazing 3D detail from the October update onward.

Here is the full album of the high res shots.

Earth

Here are two good ones of the Himalayas from space.

From Earth

The new Earth is a multi resolution combination of many data sources:

Elevations:

ETOPO1 is used as a 1KM global base map of relief and bathymetry:
Amante, C. and B. W. Eakins, ETOPO1 1 Arc-Minute Global Relief Model: Procedures, Data Sources and Analysis. NOAA Technical Memorandum NESDIS NGDC-24, 19 pp, March 2009
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/global.html

CGIAR-CSI SRTM is layered onto it to provide a high resolution 90M land layer.
Jarvis A., H.I. Reuter, A. Nelson, E. Guevara, 2008, Hole-filled seamless SRTM data V4, International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), available from
http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org.

We will continue adding sections as further super high resolution 10M datasets such as Hawaii, Maui and Mount St. Helens as we have time, but these will probably appear after the main release.

Colour Data

Colour data is generated procedurally and partially sourced from the blue marble images. Each further update of Earthsim will generate more colour procedurally and hence allow Earthsim to better model seasonal variation. To do this we will be using seasonal rainfall and temperature maps.

Exoplanets

2011-06-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

Recently we have made some good progress on the exoplanet system for Earthsim so I put together this video to show some of the results we are beginning to get. The terrain is clearly bonkers, i.e. non-physical but it shows what you can do.

Everything in this video is done with some very basic settings. The very first version of the planet editor will let you change the simple things you see in this video

Later as we further develop the planetary weather and geological model we will have more interesting planets and effects.

The surface details you see as bold colours in this video are all sensitive to both temperature and precipitation so the detail system can be used for planting vegetation once the weather of a planet has stabilised.

Fractal Planets In Earthsim

2011-03-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

While working on improving the accuracy of planets we had in Earthsim, we decided to start bringing up the fractal planet generator.

Fractal Planets

The fractal noise that is automatically generated gives the planet code a really good workout. The green planet in this video has very exaggerated mountains that show up any technical issues we have remaining in the terrain system, so we can see them to fix them.

Earthsim planets use a plug-in system to make it very easy to add all sorts of terrain features to a planet. Crater generators and even erosion can be simulated in these plug-ins and then added to a planet.

All the planet plug-ins run multi-threaded and can utilise the GPU, it would even be possible to run them over a p2p network so for very complex simulations of planets many users could work together on visualising them in real time.

When we are happy with this system, we will open-source the plug-ins so anyone who is code enabled can write their own planet generators.

Colour surface generators are similar to terrain height generators. We have some simple rules like those in Terragen for adding colours to a surface. These can also be used to extrapolate colours in a texture map for an existing 'real' planet such as the Earth, Moon or Mars.

In later updates of Earthsim all the rocks in space as well as the planets are going to be made using this same system, so you should be able to zoom into them almost forever.

Tools For Earthsim Users

Our plan is to expose more such 'edit' features in the Earthsim product itself so subscribers can tweak the high level rules that make a planet. You will be able to make planets within 'physically accurate' rules or drop those limits and go to the boundaries of the rendering system.

In this regard we have been giving the UI system a bit of an overhaul. Beta 2 of Earthsim will feature the new UI system as well as the beginnings of some tools to let you edit your own planets around distant stars.

Earthsim as a Wiki

Once you have made a change to Earthsim locally, you may want to start sharing your version of 'reality' with other users.

Our plan here is to follow a model similar to Wikipedia and let subscribers submit their changes. We have a few more exciting ideas along this route that we are experimenting with right now. I will post about them here once they are finalised.

Latest On Shadows

Dave also just fixed one more shadow glitch, so things are 'almost' rock solid there now. I thought I would do one more quick video of the improvements. It also shows some really nice interactions with the thicker atmosphere down in the valleys of Mars.

High Detail Planets

2011-01-28T17:16:00.001-08:00

We have been working on a few exciting features for the next Earthsim update and I just finished making a video showing our new rendering option for high detail landscapes. This is going to replace the 'tessellation' settings in the present browser.

Watch the video in fullscreen 1080p if you want to actually see some of the detail in there.

We have not actually added any more detail ‘data’ to our planets with this feature (though we will be adding further detail to the Earth and Mars in the future, the Moon is now as good as the best data available).

Instead, this feature is all about the detail that the planet renderer squeezes onto your graphics card. So yes, when its cranked up you need a monster GPU.

If you have 'Landscape Detail' set to High with Shadows on (as i did for these videos) you will need a 1024MB fast GPU otherwise you will get stalls and slowdowns as you run out of GPU memory.

With Landscape Detail set to 'Medium' or 'High' you will see a lot more detail on the planets surfaces. So in Earthsim the Earth, the Moon and Mars will look super crisp from space, especially if you have the Antialiasing options turned on as well (which you really should do if you are using this option)

Once you get the new browser update (due out end of Feb) If you want to see exactly the same shot of Valls Marineris just set the Earthsim time to the same as you see in the last part of the video and zoom into the right hand side of the valley, there are some really great scenes.

High-End 3D and the mass-market with AMD Fusion and Earthsim 2

2011-01-03T11:40:00.000-08:00

I am a big proponent of the possibilities of high-end 3D on personal computers. That's why I created Earthsim, a product designed to show off the beauty of our Solar System using all the power of the latest high-end 3D graphics on a PC.

I always looked forward to the day when mainstream PC users could have access to Earthsim.

Choosing to use high-end 3D was a double-edged sword for us; on the one hand it lets us show off some great visuals, but on the other, it essentially limits Earthsim use to those people who would buy top-end graphics cards: PC hobbyists, and computer gamers.

I believe the arrival of AMD Fusion APUs is going to start changing this in a very exciting way. Putting serious 3D discrete-level GPU power on the same die as the CPU, to create what AMD are calling an APU, is a big big step forward in enabling a new generation of visual computing applications in the main-stream computing space.

Apart from graphics-intensive computing, the concept of an APU is a very significant step forward in plain floating point CPU power available to programmers (with Compute Shaders, programmers can harness the 3D portions of the APU for generalised processing tasks). This is somewhat similar to the step Intel made from 386 to 486 in bringing the floating point unit onto the CPU. But it's bigger than that, there is way more floating point power in a modern 3D core such as AMD Fusion than you could ever find in a traditional CPU's floating point unit.

I think AMD Fusion will affect the software available for consumers to use in two waves:

The first obvious wave goes out through 2011, as a powerful baseline in 3D performance rolls out to PCs. This will encourage software companies to consider adopting 3D graphics into their mainstream apps along with using richer 2D effects such as transitions/wipes/fades and animations. PC games studios will obviously be delighted by AMD Fusion, their target market will be increased, and in turn stabilised by the baseline in performance established by AMD Fusion APUs.

This is where AMD Fusion seriously affects us, as Earthsim will become accessible to the mainstream through 2011 via the consumer platform this technology establishes. Earthsim was always designed to be a cool experiential learning tool for everyone, not just gamers and hobbyists.

The second wave will be more subtle and connects with the massive amount of floating point power that becomes available through the Compute Shader. There are similarities here to what happened with Sony's PS3; it took programmers a while to get to grips with how they could best use the power under the hood in that box. Integrated Compute Shaders offer something even more flexible, but it will take a few years for programmers to get used to it. It’s such a new paradigm, especially outside of the games industry.

For me, for both the above reasons, AMD Fusion is one of the biggest steps forward in computing I have seen, and one I have waited a long time for. I am excited to see what comes out of this direction in the coming years. You can go to the main AMD Fusion site for more tec info and you can see the AMD press release here. I also found a good post from Microsoft here

With all this in mind at Earthsim, we decided to take time out of our release schedule to optimise the Universe browser for AMD Fusion. We have now moved all the code over to DX11 and are beginning to find more ways we can use the Compute Shaders to further accelerate our code. The Beta 1 update we make this January is going to contain all the latest performance improvements from this work and we intend to continue further work in this direction over the coming months.

Going forward to Earthsim Beta 2, I am excited to play with Compute Shader usage in our real-time procedural planet generator. In Beta 2 we will be using this planet generator to showcase all the newly discovered exoplanets. I will post some videos of this work here as soon as things start looking good enough.

Shadows On Mars

2010-11-08T10:42:00.001-08:00

We have pretty much cracked the remaining issues with shadows and I think they are good enough to go into our next release. I believe it is a technical first to have consistent shadows zooming from space down to the ground.

There is still some work to clean-up, you can see some slight cracking if you look really close. We can handle these accuracy improvements as we go forward now.

Shadows take up more processing power so we have given you the option to turn them off completely or run them in low quality.

To see the shadows casting between the moons and rings of saturn you can look at my earlier post on planetary scale shadows

In this video I am following the Sun setting across Valles Marineris on Mars.

What Is Earthsim ?

2010-10-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

It was about time I made a promo piece that explained what Earthsim is and where the vision is going.

I hope you enjoy it full screen HD with volume up.

Thanks to Jamie Catto of 1 Giant Leap and Faithless, we have some great music going in there for Earthsim release next year.

The real thing running on a PC is 4x higher res than this video. I like the format of this piece and will probably build an upgraded version of it into Earthsim itself.

Return To Dino Island

2010-10-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be a good to record some new videos of our dinosaur work and let you understand the roadmap we are on toward the full release of Earthsim 2 next year.

The original dinosaur videos were of prototype technology work on our early planet technology. They also showed the testing we did with various animations systems and the herding behavioural systems of the dinosaurs. All this was done so that I could a) prove to myself that what I wanted to achieve in the final Earthsim 2 dinosaur world was actually possible b) come up with any new innovative ideas for how to present the sort of material you would see in a living Earthsim ecosystem.

I re-recorded some new dinosaur videos at higher resolution so you can watch them in HD.

Dinosaur Animation Systems

To really see some of the cool features of the animation technology watch the Acrocanthosaurus video below. Goto 2:50 and you can see him turning around and roaring near the end of the video.

The movements here are made out of complex composite animations spliced and blended together live in real-time. This animation system allows the creature to turn its body to many different angles while continuing to play the walk cycle animation (the walking and the turning are different artist authored animations), it can roar at many different angles too (see 3:30).

To finish this guy off we need to add blinking, eye movements to possible target prey, and the bite actions in all directions. This is now easy to add because the technology allows animators to layer as many composite blends together as they can come up with. So to bite in any direction we simply add three bites in 3 extreme directions and blend between them all to get any bite (its a form of destination IK system but its driven by authored animations), then this is blended onto all the other motion. This technology also for example allows for walking over bumpy surfaces.

We have not quite finalised the technology for four legged creatures (they are the hardest). Blending the Gastonia from a walking animation to a run still has some work left for us to do. If you look carefully at the herd from 2:40 you can see that the change of gait from walking to running can be noticed as a visual artefact. But its already not bad.

Once we finish the mechanics of animation blending for two and four legged creatures as described above, the animators will return to do another final pass on the source animations. This will take the quality of movement up to even higher level (looking at the live blended creature gives them lots of ideas for how they can improve the source segments of animation that they create to feed the tech). This will deliver the final movement for each creature we have in Earthsim 2.

Development Timeline

After the early dinosaur prototype work was done, we moved back onto completing the Earthsim 2 Universe browser that would let us zoom consistently, interactively and at high graphical quality from these dinosaurs to the nearby planets and stars.

The three remaining steps to finalise Earthsim 2 are:

1. Exoplanets
2. 600MY Paleo Timeline
3. Release Early Cretaceous Dino Earth

We will release each of these as a beta auto update as soon as it is complete. Here they are in a bit more detail:

1. Exoplanets: Climate Models and Procedural Planets

Complete our planetary climate model and procedural planet system. We will test this out putting it through its paces by delivering a number of planets from our near neighbours. Systems we are including are Epsilon Eridani and the Gliese 581 system, but as things are going well, we may be able to automate the whole process and cover all exoplanets discovered so far.

The climate model we are using is an extension of a simple heat transfer model, it includes greenhouse gas calculations as well as managing tidally locked planets (planets that always face the body they are rotating about). It can handle creating habitable zones at the borders of the day/night zone on a planet. Check out the 'higher dimensional models' section here. For more detail on tec spec you can goto the tec section of the Earthsim website where I will keep the spec for the system documented as it is finalised.

The temperatures calculated from the climate model feed into the procedural planet generator.

The procedural planet generator uses similar technology to the off-line rendering programs such as Terragen but it works in real time as you zoom into a planet.

Both the climate model and the procedural planet deserve their own posts, each contains a lot of great work. Once I get good videos of them done I will write them up.

2. 600MY Paleo Timeline

Once we have proven the planet generator on exoplanets we can set about completing the rework of the Earthsim 1 paleo timeline. We will use what we tuned for exoplanets to recreate the ancient Earth. As have a working climate model we can now use this for placing the appropriate vegetation.

3. Release: Early Cretaceous Dino Earth

Once the time-line is complete we start dropping dinosaurs onto the early Cretaceous planet. This is the 120 million year old slice of the time-line.

The Moon

2010-10-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some images of the moon we are building for the next Earthsim update.

We believe this is the 'highest-resolution-highest-definition' real-time visualisation of the moon available to date.

Shadows have not been switched on in these images. I will make a new post of some close up images showing shadows casting from craters soon.

Topology view switched on

Here is a close up view of a crater

Down on the surface

The height data comes from the recent NASA The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) currently (as of April 2010) orbiting the Moon on a low 50 km polar mapping orbit. The probe is making a high res 3-D map of the Moon's surface that we can use in Earthsim.

The color information comes from the Clementine mission. Clementine (officially called the Deep Space Program Science Experiment (DSPSE)) was a joint space project between the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and NASA.

Launched on January 25, 1994, the objective of the mission was to test sensors and spacecraft components under extended exposure to the space environment and to make scientific observations of the Moon and the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos.

Planetary Shadows

2010-10-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

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.

What's Next In Earthsim

2010-09-11T05:53:00.000-07:00

We are working on a major update for 2012 which will include all the discovered exoplanets into the Earthsim universe.

Next Update Due End January 2012

Browser:
-- Visit stars
-- More performance improvements

Next Update Due December 2011 (browser in final testing)

Browser:

-- First experimental planet editor, add sea, surface detail and atmosphere to a planet with height data.

Browser Performance Improvements:

-- Faster Login/Logout

-- Faster Star Rendering

Content:

-- Further improved Moon and Mars data

-- Saturn's moon Rhea now has real height data

-- Moon added to the Epsilon Eridani system

October 2011

The main feature of this update is the dramatic increase in the Earth resolution for subscribers, some of this new resolution is also visible to free users too.

We are also adding more resolution to a number of moons of Saturn and Jupiter which are all available for free users. The USGS have released a great new merged color image of IO so we are including that for this update.

Universe Browser:
-- Change water levels on planets
-- Change Landscape scaling
-- Medium and High Landscape Detail setting in Graphics Settings

Content:
-- Massive 8x increase in Earth detail
-- Rings added for Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune
-- Jupiter Moons: Very high res version of IO, and increased resolution on Ganymede
-- Saturn Moons: Increased resolution for: Rhea, Titan, Iapetus and Enceladus

EOS subscribers
-- 8x higher resolution Earth

ETV subscribers
-- Same as EOS
-- Venus Overview documentary

Bugfixes
- some monitor resolutions were stretched: Fixed
- cracks on planet colormaps: Fixed
- sound not playing on some PC config: fixed

Mid Jan 2011

Universe Browser:
-- Lots of performance work, should give at least 3-5 fps more.
-- AMD Fusion optimised and DX 11 Support
-- Improved shadows quality

Content:
-- Improved Epsilon Eridani System
-- Moon overview documentary

EOS subscribers
-- More 'space tour' shots (one per planet)

ETV subscribers
-- Mars Overview documentary

Nov 11 2010

Universe Browser:
-- Time Dialogue - Set, Stop and accelerate time

Content:
-- High res moon - The new high res moon data is live
-- High detail Moons for Saturn
-- Real Time planetary scale shadows. A technical first.
-- Shadows cast between moons, rings and on planets

Details

Below is the detail on what the team is actually working on right now. We will drop these into the updates over the coming months as they get done to satisfaction.

More solar system attract shots

Our goal here is to completely beat the attract shots (camera swoops) in Earthsim1. We have been writing some new tools that mean we can film our shots directly in Earthsim itself.

For Earthsim1 we used traditional 3D animation programmes, same as those used for games and animated films. But these always added limits to the type of shot we could make, nothing out there can handle the sort of scale and detail you see in Earthsim.

So for Earthsim2 we have made our own camera tools. You should be enjoying the results of these soon. And we will be able to keep adding more and more shots in each release focusing on the subject matter of that update.

Further improve planet surfaces

We have been working on what is called a procedural planet generator. This is something that can use a simple mathematical model to describe details on a planet surface. The advantage of this is that we can add more and more detail as we zoom in going beyond the data that has been gathered from space probes.

The clever thing about our model is that it 'extrapolates' real data. We feed in the real data that has been gathered from probes, and then we can add more and more detail to it. If at any point the scientists get better detail for a planet, we can simply update that on the Earthsim server and that new detail will arrive on your Earthsim browser.

For our detail tests we are focussing on Mars right now. But we are also going to be using this for creating some of the newly discovered extra solar planets.

High detail rings for Saturn and other ringed planets

I am going to post another article about how we make ringed planets as soon as I get some good screen shots from our first view of Saturn with the effects system. One of the tricky bits has been to get all the shadows correct from the rings and the moons.

Better sun surface and star special effects

I talked about this in some detail in an earlier post Mapping Sun and Star Effects

We have managed to get some really good effects on the surfaces of stars going but we still have work to do to merge them into Earthsim properly. The problem here is stars are just really really bright. And we want to use realistic data rather than just make it up. Building a rendering system that can handle going across the range needed has been tricky. As soon as we have this sorted we will release the better star surfaces into Earthsim.

Saturn Rings

2010-09-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

The amazing rings of Saturn are an incredibly intricate and detailed structure surrounding the gas giant planet.

The main rings reach from 7,000 km to 80,000 km above Saturn's equator, and have an estimated thickness of only 10 metres.

The rings are divided up into 7 major sections, named alphabetically in the order they were first discovered. Traveling from the innermost ring to the outermost the names are D, C, B, A, F, G and E.

The Keeler Gap lies between the A and F rings and the gap between the A and B rings is called the Cassini Division named after Giovanni Cassini who discovered the gap in 1676.

The F and G rings are very thin and difficult to see.

As you get closer, you see the rings are further divided into thousands of smaller rings.

Getting closer still, you can see the rocks that makeup the rings. These rocks range from 1 centimetre to 10 metres across. We believe they are nearly pure water ice, which reflects the sunlight very well, making the rings so bright and clear to the eye.

The Cassini space probe found that the rings of Saturn have their own atmosphere, composed of oxygen and hydrogen, produced when light from the Sun interacts with ice in the rings. The atmosphere is incredibly thin. So thin that if it were somehow condensed flat onto the rings, it would be about one atom thick.

The intricate ring structure is thought to arise, in several different ways, from the gravitational pulls of Saturn's many moons.

The passage of tiny moonlets such as Pan clear out some of the gaps, while other ringlets seem to be held in place by the gravitational effects of other small moons we call shepherd satellites.

Scientists think the moon Mimas holds the Cassini Division in place.

There are two main theories regarding the origin of Saturn's rings.

One proposes that the rings were once a moon of Saturn 300 km in diameter, bigger than Mimas. Either its orbit decayed until it came close enough to be ripped apart by Saturns gravitational field or it was struck by a comet breaking it apart.

The last time there were collisions large enough to break up a moon that big was during what is known as the Late Heavy Bombardment four billion years ago.

The second theory suggests that the rings were never part of a moon, but are instead left over from the original material from which Saturn formed.

In either case Saturn's rings seem to be very old. They are one of the most distinctive and beautiful features of our solar system.

Beta1 Update

2010-09-02T07:30:00.001-07:00

We made our first update release to the Earthsim2 Beta.

Your current ES2 version should auto update to it.

There are two changes to some fundamentals in this release:

1. Earthsim2 is now streaming planet data from a server. You may notice the download size of the new installer is only 33Meg. All the high res data for mars and earth streams now. This all means we can continue to increase Earthsim detail without changing the install package.

2. 'Sign In' is now supported. This means you will need to sign in with your normal earthsim account details or run as a free user. The sign in dialog box is clunky right now and we need to improve it. In the meantime i hope you can figure it out and get yourself logged in and get down to the surface of Mars.

Some Cool Things in Earthsim 2

2010-08-16T03:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some of cool things that are in the latest Earthsim 2 release.

I will keep this list up-to-date with the new features as they become available to you so you can check them out.

1. Super Hi-Res Moon (added Jan 2011)

We think this is the most detailed real-time rendered version of the moon produced. We keep improving this data as there are new versions being released over time.

From The Moon

More at Earthsim Moon

2. High Res Earth

* We have now upgraded the resolution of the Earths topography to 90M. With Earthsim you can now see some of the most stunning views of the Earth from space available.
* If you are a subscriber and have a 1024MB GPU you can turn on the 'high landscape detail' option in graphics settings to see the very very best possible views.
* Dynamic rendered sea with wave effects, sun and star reflections. You can switch off the sea or change the sea level (right click on the planet to get the popup)

More on the latest High resolution Earth in Earthsim 2

3. High Res Mars surface

* You can go right onto the surface of Mars and explore (ETV or EOS subscription versions only). Things look best if you zoom into the 'terminator' (the join between the light and dark part of the planet) as the lighting gives you stronger contrasts for all the surface features
* We have further detail to add to the Mars surface over the coming months and eventually we will add the Mars rovers.

A crater on the surface of mars in Earthsim 2

Valles Marineris at sunrise in Earthsim 2

4. Topology Views

* We have new topology data for Earth, the Moon and Mars. Its worth having a look close-up at each planet and turning on the topology setting (right click on the planet to get the popup) (ETV or EOS subscription versions only)

A crater on the moon in Earthsim 2 topology view

5. 250,000 stars

* Zoom out to get a look at our closest neighbours
* We have 25 stars in there that we are going to be doing more work on in the coming months
* The next step for Earthsim is to add all the newly discovered Exoplanets and allow you to go and visit all of them.
* Epsilon Eridani currently has two planets and a simple moon you can edit with the planet editor.

Zooming out in Earthsim 2 to see our neighbours

6. Saturn

We have continued to improve both the Saturn and Jupiter system. Here are some of the latest shots and a video of Saturn.

7. ATI Eyefinity support

* Runs on 3 and 6 screen ATI Eyfinity

Close up Mars craters

2010-04-03T15:23:00.001-07:00

Seb has just got our latest data pipeline up for merging high resolution detail onto the surface of planets. Here are some pictures of the 2005 discovered Mars ice crater.

And here is a link the the actual photos from the Mars Express Probe.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808BE_1.html

I would like to add an effect on the ice so we can really make it stand out as it does in the photo but we are already pretty close.

In Earthsim1 we had to superimpose 3D geometry onto of the planet when we flew in close. It was not a seamless experience, the Earthsim1 technology could not support the massive detail of a high resolution planet that we can with Earthsim2

The Mars crater documentary is a good example of this. In ES2Alpha4 we have now got a truly integrated high resolution Mars crater. Infact we can now add high resolution detail wherever we want down to the centimetre level of accuracy if we want to.

Mapping sun and star effects

2010-04-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Saman has just done a nice 'noise' rendering system so we can do effects for the surface of the sun and stars. Using our noise system we can also do solar coronas (the atmosphear of the sun) this will let us do eclipses, which will be nice. We are using 4D noise, 3 dimensions are mapped onto the sphere of the star and the 4th is used to animate the noise over time. If you use the right color table to map the noise into you get a lava effect, but many other textures can be generated using noise like marble etc.

Here is a video of the surface effect without the corona

So this is the effects system for sunV1 in Earthsim2. We have no sunspots and no solar prominences, those are going to have to wait untill we return to the sun for sunV2, the next time we visit sun code. At that point we will be ready to make a bunch of star and sun docs. But for now we are aiming for simply looking at pretty stars that map to the real data we get from astronomers.

Mapping to the real world
OK so we have a cool effect, it looks pretty but we want to map it to something a bit more real. The effects system has lots of paramaters we can now set. These are just numbers that for example set the scale of the noise as well as how fast it animates etc. The next step is to decide how those numbers are decided from real astronmical data.

The simplest way to go is to base the mapping off the Hertzsprung Russell diagram (HR). This is a graph of star luminosity against color. Knowing the brightness of a star as well as its color will tell you alot of the things you care about for any star, using an HR diagram can really help you undestand stars. And luckily for earthsim all the astronomers spend all their time observing and documenting the bigghtness and colors of as many stars as they can.

In Earthsim all we need is the 3D position of the star, its luminosity and its color and the rest just falls out as below.

1. So the 3D position is just where we put the star in Earthsim.
2. We will use the spectral type to modify the color table for the lava effect so this makes the surface look the right sort of color
3. We will use the luminosty to set the brightness of the star from a distance.

Now how to get closeup. First we need to know how big the ball is for the star

Some maths comes in here so you can skip it

Maths start --------------------------------

I found a good summary article here:

http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en/proj/advanced/hr/radius1.asp

But a quick summary is that from the Luminosty of a star you can use Boltzmann's law to work out the size of the star.

The Luminosity L = 4πR2σT4

This equation can be expressing in terms of solar units such that:

L/Lo = (R/Ro)2(T/To)4
where Lo, Ro and To are the luminosity, radius and surface temperature of the Sun.

Knowing that Stefan-Boltzmann's constant is 5.67x10-8 lets you calculate the luminosity of a star in units of watts (like a light bulb) if we know the radius of the star in meters and the temperature in kelvins. For example, the Sun is 6.96x108 meters in radius and has a surface temperature of 5780K. Therefore, its luminosity is 3.84x1026 watts.

On a log-log plot, the R squared term in the above equations is a straight line on an HR diagram. This means that on a HR diagram, a star's size is easy to read off once its luminosity and color are known.

Maths end -------------------------------

Great, so we have the color, and the size of the ball as well as its brightness/luminosity. We can draw the right sized ball at the right color and brightness now.

The FX
Now for some effects. We need setup a mapping of the parameters of the noise function we have to different types of stars. For simplicity we are going to setup effects parameters for the four corners of the HR diagram and linearly interpolate them for all stars across the diagram. For now we will manually setup parameters for each of the four corners of the HR digram as yet I have not manage to find any research on what other stars may actually look like, so its all hypothetical for now.. Feedback is welcome.

And that should do it.

For later we will design a dialog box that lets you drag a point across and image of the HR diagram and see the star change dynamically

Earthsim

Earthsim 2011 Review

Water On Mars

High Res Earth

Saturn Images

High Res Earth

Exoplanets

Fractal Planets In Earthsim

Tools For Earthsim Users

Earthsim as a Wiki

Latest On Shadows

High Detail Planets

High-End 3D and the mass-market with AMD Fusion and Earthsim 2

Shadows On Mars

What Is Earthsim ?

Return To Dino Island

Dinosaur Animation Systems

Development Timeline

1. Exoplanets: Climate Models and Procedural Planets

2. 600MY Paleo Timeline

3. Release: Early Cretaceous Dino Earth

The Moon

Planetary Shadows

What's Next In Earthsim

We are working on a major update for 2012 which will include all the discovered exoplanets into the Earthsim universe.

Next Update Due End January 2012

Browser:-- Visit stars-- More performance improvements

Next Update Due December 2011 (browser in final testing)

October 2011

We are also adding more resolution to a number of moons of Saturn and Jupiter which are all available for free users. The USGS have released a great new merged color image of IO so we are including that for this update.

Nov 11 2010

Details

More solar system attract shots

Further improve planet surfaces

High detail rings for Saturn and other ringed planets

Better sun surface and star special effects

Saturn Rings

Beta1 Update

Some Cool Things in Earthsim 2

1. Super Hi-Res Moon (added Jan 2011)

2. High Res Earth

4. Topology Views

5. 250,000 stars

6. Saturn

7. ATI Eyefinity support

Close up Mars craters

Mapping sun and star effects

Browser:
-- Visit stars
-- More performance improvements