Upon receiving a request for a visualization from an editor at Scientific American (the Fire Atlas website we'd done was getting well-known... more on this soon), I decided to share the opportunity in friendly competition with another visualizer on our team (me being the "senior" in our work at times).
I seem to recall having published in a couple of major magazines around then, and didn't want to be accused of "self-aggrandishment."
Accordingly, if memory serves, we both submitted three visualizations of global fire data. The above image, though, is my favorite of the three I produced. One of my other pieces was selected (a single globe variation from the above image, without the reflections and shadows). Another "thrill of a lifetime" to see it published months later.
The data compositing was accomplished using Photoshop, and the 3-D rendering was done using Bryce. Bryce has some superb algorithms for ray tracing, reflection, specular, and ambient settings, and I'd been running tests with it for years to learn how to get the right angles for reflecting the "underside" of a data globe. Infini-D and Stratovision were also candidates for the task, but Bryce, although having a steeper learning curve, provides more flexibility and seemingly better results for this kind of effort.
Fringe benefit: using the same tool I probably animated a 360 "horizontal" rotation of the globes later (outputted to QuickTime). I don't remember. I've done this countless times with other global datasets and Bryce (as well as other tools), but can't seem to find such in my archives for this composite.
Final note: I was the Visualizations Coordinator for both NASA Terra and TRMM Satellite Missions at Goddard Space Flight Center when doing the above work.
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