Today I was working on something completely different. I’ve had a great idea of what I want to include on the interior of the LAB, so I had to focus on this asset today.

It is suppose to be a hologram of the Earth with the information of its current state. The dinosaur spices count, the population etc. I wanted it to looks real as a hologram of current planet state (day and night circle as well), but I’ve decided to only go for rotation and moving clouds. Preparing everything from a scratch took me entire day, but it was worth it! I love the final result and it will add a lot to the interior of a lab.

The actual asset is quite big in a game, so I went for a quite high tris count. I had to copy the planet’s sphere three times and place it inside each other to get the final effect (each one for: clouds, base planet, internal planet). I had to experiment with it several times, as I wanted to be able to see the hologram from the inside as well. It required an additional sphere to be placed inside. There may be another way of doing so, but I don’t know any other way around it.

I’ve used a free texture from a real satellite and manipulated it to get the final look of the futuristic planet Earth. I wanted to distort the current look of the continents, as currently everyone talks that in the future, most of the land will be flooded by water. That’s why the planet looks a bit different than right now.

The bigger challenge was to create the visuals of the rays that are getting from the stand to the actual hologram. I had to make an additional geometry and texture it separately to get the effect. I believe it works well at the end.