Animation from space to close-up of company on earth

[Philip Boal]

Google Earth is being used all over the cable & network news programs. Its a very cool look. As for liscencing or copyright issues … i have no idea.

Editor, Muscular Dystrophy Association

[Arnie Schlissel]

Check the stock libraries. There are canned zoom in & out of space animations for many major cities (at least in the US). You may also be able to combine some canned spinning globe footage with a zoom into a satellite photo or map. Also check NASA to see if they have the right kind of satellite photos or footage for you to use in the event you have to ‘roll your own’.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Mark Suszko]

If you need to do it fast without rights hassles, GIS for NASA earth pics, find a large-scale flattened globe image. Try to get it as something better than jpeg, like a targa or tiff. If your NLE system has DVE effects, you can wrap this image as a skin over a ball shape in about two seconds, then keyframe your zooming moves to taste, it’s really not hard, I used to do that stuff for fun with my Pinnacle Alladin.

The other fast way would be to use Lightwave 3d (if you have it) to make the animation: LW comes with the major planets already installed, last I knew, you just make a sphere, apply the texture, set a starfield picture as the render background, and go hog wild animating the flying camera. Bryce 3D would be good for this as well.

There are cheap or free animation programs out there that all work pretty much the same way as that, you could try something like Blender or crystal 3d impact pro, just find that NASA flattened image to wrap around a sphere and you’re good to go.

The NASA maps will not get you awesome detail all the way down to building level: for that, you cheat by addin g ina cloud layer to fly thru, on the cut when you come out of the white cloud, you can now use a higher-rez areial photography view of the neighborhood… but those are usually copyrighted. You can find free resources for that closeup stuff from the USGS web site. Also google “Terragen”.

[Erik Hermesman]

There is actually a tutorial right here on the COW.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=27&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rippon_richard/cloud_flythru/index.html

Good Luck!

[Jeremy Wiles]

I’ve used a great program put out by NASA to do some zoom in earth animation. It’s called WorldWind. And it’s real satellite…

It takes awhile to figure out, but well worth the time. Also download the script maker to go with it. That will help in creating the animation. https://www.mitglied.lycos.de/canosso/uriscript.html

https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

Jeremy