by I'm creating an animation where the camera zooms into the Earth, first from
several thousand mile out in space, and ultimately ending up only a few
miles from the surface. I have high-resoultion satelite imagery from
Terrametrics that comes in multiple levels of resolution.
For example, when the camera is way out in space, I'd like to have the low
resolution texture of the whole earth applied to the sphere. Once the camera
zooms into North America, however, I'd like to use a special high-resolution
texture tile of that specific region.
I have a total of about 6 different levels of detail that I'd like to switch
to during the length of the entire animation.
It seems if the Mix material allowed an arbitrary number of materials like
the Composite material does, that would be ideal. Or else if the Composite
material had "mix" values for the different maps. Since neither exists, I'm
thinking I need to create a Mix material, where each map is another Mix
material, etc. That way I form a "tree" of maps and can animate the "mix"
amount based on the camera's distance from the Earth.
I'm wondering, however, if there's a better way to do this?
TIA,
Nate Hayes
Sunfish Studio