Is it possible to create a moving model of the earth (e.g. shockwaves of earthquake?)

Question

Total nooby. If there is 3D data with a high enough resolution, would it be possible to create a moving model and show shockwaves over time? Regards, Jaco

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible,

There are a number of things that I would suggest you need to think about.

I assume that you already have the knowledge of using rendering software etc. If not there is a bit of a steep learning curve in that itself.

1. Where you would get your data from.
2. What 3D render software you would use
3. What render plugins you would then use to calculate, render the shock waves.
4. What you render processing budget is and therefore how much of an area you wish to simulate/render.

Data Sets

A quick google brings up this, which would seem a good starting point

https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-017-0687-2

Render Software

I would recommend something like Autodesk Maya, as it's designed for 3D rendering, scales out well for distributed rendering and has a very wide range of plugins that can help you achieve your goals.

Plugins

I would suggest looking for plugins that cover creating Shock Waves / Heat Distortion Waves as they would give the ripple effect that you are looking for.

Budget/size of render/simulation

Rendering is not cheap, it takes time in developing the model to render and then time/cost to perform the rendering. The higher the resolution and the larger the area of the planet you wish to simulate the longer it will take. I would recommend looking at a render farm that supports distributed rendering splitting the job over many machines otherwise you could wait months for it to finish on a single machine.

Disclaimer I used to work for YellowDog so I have a natural bias to recommend them: https://yellowdog.co/industries/cgi-rendering/

But there are many to chose from a good list can be found at https://rentrender.com/all-render-farms-list/