Earth Digital — Advanced Compositing for Operation: Deli Platter
Rendering Natural looking Beauty
Earth Digital
Operation: Deli Platter is a short film that started as personal series of renders telling
a story about border control, modern warfare and the pharmaceutical industry :)
Over time it has evolved into an episodical animation series.
The first shot in the series is one of planet Earth!
Rendered in Cinema 4D and Chaos Corona.
Since the production of Syntactic Labyrinths started we have been in Earth R&D.
This eventually led to the project Earth Digital, a digital twin of planet Earth for cinema visual effects.
I’ve made lots of Earth renders before so it was fun to play around with the settings for this one.
A thought from the book Beauty by Roger Scruton stuck with me.
Scruton argues that the importance of beauty and its transcendental nature can be found in anything that’s real.
For example, nature can be appreciated as beauty pure by itself.
I wondered if it was possible to achieve such a result in an artwork which lacks the photorealism of real-life.
The first thing I did was utilise our Star System a bit more.
During developments for Syntactic Labyrinths we also ran into the issue of "flickering" stars.
This could be solved through the use of high-dynamic range (32-bit) stars in our plate.
I’ve been using these star maps for a while now, but hadn’t considered adding Really bright stars in the shot.
Considering natural beauty comes from reality, I replicated the position of the stars from NASA’s star plotting page.
You could also use Celestia if you’d like a native application.
I’m not sure whether this works on an emotional level, but I feel like having these “accurately placed” stars brings
a level of subtle realism to the background that becomes engaging to look at.
The moon itself rendered a bit dark at first, but I made use of the NormalsShading map to lift the values in post.
Each color of the normal map can be used as a mask for your Color Correct nodes during compositing.
I’ve made use of a few more subtle channels in the Earth render:
Especially the Vapor Density map benefits the volumetric shadows a lot! I was very surprised that it worked so well :)
Making planets is all in the details. How tall are your clouds?
How thick is your atmosphere at which point? You know the deal.
So here we are, Earth Digital.
New updated texture maps, 32-Bit Star plates included, 2 Hour process demo, many many updates to the shaders!
This is not essential. It depends on the use-case for your shot.
The atmosphere is also something I often render out separately to get a better result in compositing.
Achieving a good result in Earth Digital is mainly about framing and lighting.
Where do you want to place your sun? Where are you floating with your camera?
The atmosphere and Clouds shader are set up for Chaos Corona and
Depending on your use-case you can use one sun or multiple suns linked together (through Xpresso).
This can be useful when you need more control over the light color for different layers.
Finally, I’ve made use of our Bokeh Builder aperture maps to give a soft rounded bokeh like that of a human eye:
When applied to a render it looks like this:
As most of it is in focus it is difficult to see its effect. It mainly adds some color variation to your render, as the aperture map isn’t pure grayscale.
Shallow Depth-of-field example from Deli Platter:
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