Planet Texturing?

[mikefrisk]

Is there a way to set a texture's opacity based on the amount of light cast on the surface? For example the dark side of the earth would show a different image map of city lights etc, whereas the lighted side would show green terrain etc. Cant seem to find a solution.

[prehabitat]

(Warning: total guess)

Couldn't you have the lights a scattered polygon with size very small, but clustered based on cities (should be able to find a vector image on population density to feed this via phantom scatter?)

Lights would be covering the whole earth and using large samples they would simply be washed out in the light side?

[gordonrobb]

If only we had a good old fashioned Lightwave gradient

Have you tried using the normal lightwave nodes to mix the two images together in the old way, then input that into the rasterized input of the Octane Image node?