Ultimate Earth is the best quality highest resolution collection of terrain, bathymetry, color imagery and cloud maps we could assemble that covered the entire planet Earth.

Ultimate Earth contains nominally 1-km land-mass terrain data, 10-km bathymetry data, 1-km imagery and 5-km plausible cloud map data for the entire globe. The DEM data alone contains over 939 million data points. The imagery comprises one billion pixels.

For even more limited local regions, start with one of the Quarter projects, and further reduce the number of DEMs by selecting and disabling unnecessary DEMs. VNS users have the option of using the spatial selection capabilities of a Search Query to easily select and activate/deactivate DEMs. Reducing the number of DEMs is always a worthwhile effort.

Tech Tip: Note that a complete globe’s worth of stand-in ETOPO5 DEMs is included in each project, set to View but not Render. Therefore, when you load a partial project, you will see the entire globe in Views, but only the partial area of high-resolution will render.

Here is a complete list of all of the Projects that UltimateEarth includes:

VNS 2 and later versions have an Image Management feature that has no trouble dealing with the enormous TIFF images, however, in order to ensure usability for WCS 6 users as well, the imagery has been split into numerous (32) tiles. WCS does not actually load these tiles until they are needed, making it possible for WCS 6 to handle this large amount of imagery. It goes without saying that VNS will also have no trouble.

If needed, the distance at which the dissolve occurs can be adjusted in the project. The adjustment is found as a dynamic parameter (Z Distance) on the opacity channel of the texture in the Material of the Ground Component.

UEGround has only the texturing provided from the imagery drape. If you wish to use real Clouds with UEGround, they are available as a separate component (below).

UEGroundClouds has the imagery texturing, and also has the cloudmap layered on top, also as basic texturing. These are not 3D clouds, just the appearance of clouds painted onto the Earth. This is useful for long-distance views, but looks odd when close to the surface. This will render much faster than real clouds.

UEGroundShadows has the ground texturing with a darkening effect applied wherever the cloudmap defines clouds are present (using Diffuse Intensity texturing). This simulates the effect of shadowing on the ground below clouds, without the rendering time and memory expense of real shadow maps. This Ground Component is most useful when used with the real Cloud component (below).

ETOPO5 Elev Shader is a standard component from WCS and VNS that applies a range of colors based upon elevation, making for an atlas-like shading good for illustrating major terrain features. It does not make use of any of the UltimateEarth imagery.

These clouds will look better than the UEGroundClouds, especially when viewed from low elevations, but will take longer to render.

To get the look of shadows falling onto the terrain beneath the clouds, use the UEGroundShadows component, which darkens the ground using the same texture that drives the clouds. This will be faster than using real shadows.

Tech tip: This is accomplished using the Diffuse Intensity channel of the Ground material. This technique will work on the illuminated or darkened sides of the Earth.

Tech Tip: Due to the impracticality of chopping the cloud image up into multiple tiles, any project using the clouds, real or texture-mapped, will end up loading the entire 8192×4096 pixel cloud image into memory. VNS 2 and later versions have no difficulty with this, but this may consume a large amount of memory on WCS 6 systems. An alternative cloud map image, “ev11643_cloud_combined_4096” is supplied that is only 4096×2048 pixels. No components use this image, but it can be easily substituted into projects using the Image Object Library.

There are also Ocean components included with Ultimate Earth, UEOcean and UEShinyOcean. The only difference between the two is the specularity channel. In UEShinyOcean, the water material has some specularity to it, which will cause a sunlight glint on the surface. This is normally desirable as real water has this effect. These ocean components also come in variants with shadows or clouds textured onto them.

At times however, it may be necessary to use the UEOcean component. For example, the decision of what is ocean and what is not is driven by the elevation in the DEMs. If you use the Ultimate Earth components with lower-quality data (like the ETOPO DEMs, see below) or with data from a different source, the two datasets may not agree on what is water an what is not. Normally this is not a problem as the errors will only occur in small, low-lying areas, and Ultimate Earth will happily paint water color onto lowland areas. However, if the water areas glint and the incorrect water areas on low-lying terrain do not, the difference may become noticeable. In this case, it may be useful to use the non-Shiny version to eliminate the difference. Another alternative would be to make the water be non-Shiny in shallow areas where the discrepancy is likely to occur, but this sort of depth-based shading is just as likely to reveal defects in poor quality bathymetry.

The UltimateEarth projects have been set up with the lower-resolution ETOPO5 DEMs also in the project, but set to View enabled, Render disabled. The UltimateEarth DEMs are set to Render enabled, View disabled. Therefore, realtime Views will show the smaller, faster, less-detailed ETOPO DEMs, but renderings will feature the full-resolution data. This can be a major interactivity optimization.

To save space, the ETOPO5 DEMs are not on the Ultimate Earth DVD-ROM, they were included and installed with WCS or VNS, and the projects should find them automatically. To make working with the ETOPO low-res DEMs easier, they have a Layer of “ETOPO5” added to them in the Database Editor.

These images are set to ‘Keep in Memory Short’ to allow WCS to unload these images as quickly as possible when they are no longer needed. Nonetheless, rendering of areas where numerous full-resolution images are required (polar regions) may tax the memory and virtual memory resources of WCS 6 systems.

Another potential snag is the preview thumbnails in the Texture Editor. On WCS 6 systems, if a Texture Element using a large image is selected for editing, that entire image must be loaded into memory in order to generate the tiny preview. This will take some time and consume a moderate amount of memory. We recommend turning off all the Texture Preview thumbnails when editing Ultimate Earth textures, as their benefit in this situation is negligible anyway. VNS systems with Image Management know not to try loading the image to create the preview and will present a Stand-In image that doesn’t need to be loaded from disk.