"Blue Marble" Render Test

3ds max 4.2 | finalRender Stage-1 Alpha
2002

A first "lower earth orbit" shot using 1km-tiles of the invaluable "Blue Marble" set of texture maps by NASA, the highest-quality free planetary maps available. This was an experiment to use blurry raytracing instead of traditional specular highlights to visualize the reflectance properties of oceanic surfaces with proper "cut-off" underneath the clouds.