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

[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.