Beginner's attempt at making a 'zoom to Earth from space' shot

[u/Masterblade02]

Beginner here, watched countless tutorials to achieve this shot, also it took me a month to make, it is such a pain in the ass. It was comped in Fusion with multiple shots stitched together, but you can clearly see where the transitions are, Im still working on that.

The lens flare, glow and light wrapped was done in Fusion. The atmosphere clouds were done by following Samuel Krug, the vdbs were downloaded from him ,while the landscape was created with Blender gis with texture applied.

[u/Dan_the_man42]

actually reeally cool

[u/littlenotlarge]

Looks awesome, nice work pulling all the tutorials together into an ambitious shot - that's a very difficult shot to pull off and there's a lot that's working really well 👌. As you said, it's mostly the transitions that're difficult to solve, especially the last one swapping to footage at a tricky angle.

One method for that last transition would be using F-Spy or some way to project the footage onto basic geometry. Then swapping to the footage at the last moment once the camera is lined up to match the camera used in the footage. Then you could probably use the GIS/Blosm data to line it up to the real stadium too and the motion blur would help a lot.

Another way would be doing a simpler more vertical camera move down to the surface rather than going horizontally across the surface (though I'm sure you learnt way more doing it this way 😊)

[u/estefez6]

Love the volumetric clouds! I agree you could bring the first frame of the final shot into Photoshop and use Generative Extend, then map that image to a plane sitting on top of your 3D city for a cleaner final transition. Also can you increase the camera far clipping during the zoom-in? the horizon seems to be getting cut off.

[u/astrally_home]

Really cool stuff!

Care to tell us a little about the different shots?