Desktop planetscapes?

[steuard]

Here's what I want as my computer desktop image, or maybe as a screensaver:

I want a pretty landscape, maybe a mountain lake with some nearby woods. I want the lighting of the scene to follow a more or less real time 24-hour day/night cycle (including shadows, appropriate tints for dawn and dusk, things like illumination by moonlight, and stars in the sky at night). If possible, I want the appearance to adjust to follow the seasons in real time, too. (Including a bit of variation in weather or at least clouds would be interesting as well, though I'd want to be able to forbid completely overcast skies.) Something like this may exist: anyone know?

But... I want this simulated landscape to be located on a habitable, Earthlike moon of a gas giant planet. (Rings? Maybe.) The scene's lighting should be based on not just the sun but also light reflected from the sunlit parts of the central planet (and perhaps on any other moons that pass nearby in their own orbits), and the planet's appearance in the sky should be scientifically accurate. The seasonal cycle should be based at least generally on some calculation of solar heating based on the orbits involved. (That might not be much different than what we're familiar with, but I'd want to check. Would there be any significant monthly cycle on top of the annual one?) It might even be fun to include some mildly spectacular feature somewhere in the night sky, too: a nearby nebula or cluster, maybe. Bonus points if there is a practical orbit for another inhabited moon of the gas giant to occasionally come close enough to see continents and weather patterns (and city lights at night).

I'd be amazed if anyone had actually written a program encompassing this whole idea, but I think it should be possible today. If it were done well (with good attention to both art and science, and with configurable details if possible), I'd be willing to pay a fairly substantial price for it.

Comments

[akjdg.livejournal.com]

Well, the first paragraph could be fulfilled, crudely, with a window next to your desk. Unfortunately, this approach does not scale easily to address the additional specifications set forth in your second paragraph.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

"Well, the first paragraph could be fulfilled, crudely, with a window next to your desk"

LOL

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Alas, central Michigan is sadly lacking in mountains, and I don't think I could handle a commute from a house that had them.

But you have anticipated one aspect of this that I hadn't mentioned: I'd actually prefer to have this running not as my desktop background, but on a very large flat-panel monitor embedded in the wall and surrounded by a window frame. (I've been trying to figure out if there would be a reasonable way to incorporate one or more full-spectrum lamps at various positions behind the window frame as well.)

[steuard.livejournal.com]

A few implementation notes:

Some people would certainly prefer a beach scene, or a forest river, or a prairie: options would be good. A city scene could be popular, too, but it would be pretty creepy unless you also found a way to include realistic people and other dynamic elements into the scene. (Naturally, the other scene options could benefit a lot from that as well. In fact, a beach scene without waves would look wrong, too, and tides would be a nice touch.)

To implement the daily cycle of lighting in the scene, my first thought would be to set up a fixed camera at a real location on a clear day and take high quality pictures once an hour(?) from just before dawn to just after dusk. I'd do the same thing at night with the full moon (though moonrise and moonset would be best captured a few days before and after that to avoid solar interference; those would be better times to get moon-free dawn and dusk photos, too). Then I'd morph from one picture to the next throughout the day. It shouldn't be too hard to blend appropriate amounts of sunlight and moonlight, either.

To get the seasonal cycle, just repeat this whole procedure once a month or so. Lighting variations due to phases of the moon could be handled by interpolating between pictures with a full moon and on a moonless night. That ought to be enough to do a pretty good job with the Earth-based version.

And once you have that down, getting the lighting right for the extrasolar planet scene would just be a matter of calculating the intensity and direction of light from each relevant source (sun, planet, other moons... second, distant sun? Maybe as an option.) and blending appropriately. (There might be issues with getting night shadows "soft" enough depending on how big the planet was in the sky, but that's a minor point.) The actual sky shouldn't be too bad, either: use real photos of Jupiter or Saturn or the Earth from space (for another inhabited moon), for example, work out their brightness (and phase), and combine with the other elements of the scene (including the daylit sky) as appropriate.

For variety, I could imagine some people wanting to run the whole thing at a multiple of real time, too: two or three or 4.7 days per day, for example. But that's trivial to enable.

Anyone want to do this for me? :)

[kirin]

As an alternative to the camera capture approach, a decent rendering package and a skilled artist ought to be able to produce something similar at near photo-realistic quality. The advantage to that approach is that adding additional light sources calculated from any current arrangement of sun/planet/moons would be trivial, and could either be updated in real time if you didn't mind using up some processor, or pre-rendered in a variety of states and blended.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that could actually be better in a lot of ways. I was hesitant to suggest that route because (A) I personally would not be capable of doing it justice (certainly not without a lot of training), while with photos I think I possibly could, and (B) I haven't kept up with rendering stuff well enough to know how close those packages come to capturing the full richness and detail of an actual photo and an actual place. I emphatically don't want this to look the slightest bit fake or idealized: I'm looking for an everyday pretty scene from real life that just happens to be set in a quirky solar system.

For the record, my goals for this, in order, would be (1) to get a scientifically accurate glimpse of what it would look like from day to day if our familiar Earth were located in a novel solar system, and (2) to have an aesthetically attractive scene to look at. I figure that the aesthetic beauty would come mostly from the real-life location, but you might be able to enhance that a bit with particularly clever choices of orbital parameters and other details of the solar system.

[kirin]

Actually, it occurs to me that the rendered approach has very nearly been done, in the PS3's new-ish animated themes. I've got one that's an African savannah with zebras going by, and I think it has a real-time day/night cycle to it. I wouldn't say it's *quite* photo-realistic, but it's definitely getting close. Of course, the PS3 has a pretty massive 3D-graphics-oriented processor that's mostly sitting idle when it's on menu screens.

I haven't seen any themes come across that are quite what you're looking for, but most of the pieces are there. There were a few for-pay themes that showed up to tie in with the new Star Trek movie that had slowly shifting planet/nebula scenes.

[cabarney.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I'm having a heck of a time finding it online, but not so long ago I saw a video of this type of implementation. They filmed several locations in hi-definition for an hour or so, then displayed it on two large, side-by-side, vertically oriented LCD TVs, splitting the image between the two. The TVs were framed the way that window would be framed, so it didn't look like two TVs.

The cool thing they did on top of that was motion tracking. (this only works for one person, of course). You have the option of wearing an IR light source around your neck. Hidden between the "windows" and behind the wall is a Wiimote. As you move around the room, the image displayed on the monitors changes to simulate the parallax of a real window.

Very cool. The programming of the virtual version of this would be relatively easy (and fairly fun, I'd think) - it's the art that would be difficult. I don't think it would be hard finding a decent rendered landscape, then animating the sources of light wouldn't be tough - it would be animating the objects in the scene from the effects of wind, and also adding weather. Good luck.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow: I hadn't even dared to hope that someone could get the parallax right, though of course I wanted it. (The "only one person" aspect is an issue, of course, and essentially impossible to get around with any technology that I know of.)

As for the programming, I agree that it would be a fairly straightforward project if you had a good 3D landscape already available. But it would still be tremendously easier for someone with graphics programming experience than it would be for me. (I've done almost nothing with graphics since my BASIC days! I played with OpenGL a very little bit a few years back, but never for anything substantial.) And anyway, I won't have the time to implement a project like this for the foreseeable future. Hence my attempts to intrigue someone else into doing it for me. :)

[cabarney.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I've been planning on doing the video-based implementation for a while, along with dozens of other development projects that I don't have the time for. I hadn't thought of the virtual 3d landscape - probably because I knew it was miles beyond my ability to even attempt something reasonable.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

The BBC has done some amazing stuff with time-lapse photography or something. There are scenes in Planet Earth that clearly show the passage of time in one area -- a hillside of deciduous trees changing color over the course of fall, all compressed into a few seconds; a single tree bursting into bloom in spring; the sun circling the sky in the arctic. So the photography skills are definitely out there, and possibly the exact footage necessary (or at least some of it, although of course negotiating for rights to it would certainly be interesting).

Newt

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

The straightforward way to do it would be (tediously) building a 3D scene with a modeler, and then using something like OpenGL to light it.

You could probably cheat by lighting a scale model (or a real scene with a very bright light) with various colors of light, and then interpolating the lights.