I am providing some geek’ish fun on a Monday by providing the world in a 3D drawing. The AutoCAD 2007 format drawings show the Earth at day and night with the raster images courtesy of NASA. The drawing was created awhile back by our Gs team which are the propeller heads behind Autodesk Graphics Subsystems in plain words the display on your screen from Autodesk products. I have higher resolution textures of the Earth able to texture a real scale Earth 3D model but the file download size would not be good for many people. AutoCAD has been crazy accurate since the 80’s with 64bit floating point precision and one well known example is the Solar System drawing that was to scale where you could view the solar system 1:1 and then zoom to the moon to view the lunar lander then the nameplate on the lander. It may seem simple to create a real 1:1 solar system and zoom around it but it took some CAD companies almost 20 years to attain the same ability and precision.
Cheers,
Shaan
