How to create a flight to a planet?

[tom_gamer]

Hello,

I'm not sure, if this is the right board for my question (@admins: please move it, just in case ).

I want to do a seamless flight from a great height (about 100km, 62mi) to the surface of a planet.

At the start position, I have the planet and the surrounding space as a skybox. A the end position I have an other skybox plus a terrain scene node. But what to do between start and end?
Do you have any ideas how to create a smooth transition? What kind of graphic effect can be used? And how much does Irrlicht support this?

[CuteAlien]

Swapping the scene out depending on level of detail you want and preferably with some kind of interpolation. Maybe check how software like earth3d (which is opensource) does that. If I remember right they had some procedural LOD system for that (been a few years when I had last looked for something like that...and I did never try it myself).

[Granyte]

To complement what CuteAlien you would need some kind of lod but it really depends on what you are hopping to get out of this if you are just looking for a kind of cool cinematic effect you can always fake it using a carefully crafted scene that give the illusion to the used that he is flying from a place to an other while you are peacefully loading stuff in the background.

How ever if you need to give the user the hability to fly where ever he wishes like i do in my project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7csKHDu ... Cd6XtKKGAw
you will ethier have to look into procedural generation¸to generate the details on the fly or into detail streaming