A blast from the past

 

Looking back, the desire to create a view of our planet from space is nothing new for me. I actually did one about 12 years ago back when I was still using LightWave 3D. It was part of a scene I was building for my demo reel (which never got done because I got hired as a game artist overseas)

Amazingly, my old website is still around and you can see what I was going on about here. Back then I tried but failed to get the clouds to look right. Even now, it still presents a kind of challenge and I shall have to crack my head on this problem in due time.

During the 1990s, Newtek's LightWave 3D was a fantastic piece of 3D software and many independent artists and professional CG studios have used it (and are probably still using it) to producing amazing visual effects and CG works. It was affordable even to an independent CG artist like me back when other professional software was costing ten times more. LightWave rulez ^_^/

Now of course, times and technologies have changed. Many 3D software makers have made their software available free through special "learning editions". Also, free open source 3D programs such as Blender are every bit as capable as many of the commercial packages out there.

I currently teach CG at a local institute and have access to 3D software such as Autodesk Maya. My new CG Earth project started life in Maya but later migrated to another software for several reasons. But that's a story for another post.