This project has taken me many hours to complete, but it was a lot of fun. I’ve attached three shots of the two different Earth models I’ve built. One of the models is designed to be photo-realistic, the other is designed after NASA’s Blue Marble. Each model includes three sections: a day section, a night section, and a city lights section. The sections can be rendered independently of each other, or in any combination.
You can see some full-size renders (including some 2560x1920 ones) at this page. The Blue Marble model allows for some serious close-up rendering (after all, some of the maps I used are 21600x10800 pixels, and that’s small compared to the biggest size available from NASA!).
so that others can benefit from the work I’ve done. This is not a “how-to-get-Earth-in-five-easy-steps” kind of tutorial; I go into details such as land-masked specular shading, ray-traced cloud shadows, and city lights. I provide links for finding and downloading the maps that I used (which come from the Visible Earth project and are all free), and also provide credit information. Three of the maps (the photo-realistic land map and the two night land maps) I actually modified and uploaded myself - I don’t know of anywhere else where you can get free high-quality maps like these.
An animation of the photorealistic model may be found here.
That’s nice, in a similar animation in a thread of mine I have animated the appearance of the atmosphere over time too. using a time node input to the mix node. Nice hires renders there too. I think that the atmos is a bit to neon (over saturated) however.
BTW, would you consider adding a link to the PDF tutorial on the “Mapped Blender Earth” webpage? That would eliminate having to provide two links for the same subject when recommending this resource. Thanks.
Done. Note that there is also an official tutorial page which links both to the PDF and to the regular Earth page - but it looks very plain, though I’m hoping to fix that. I’m planning on re-formatting my site soon, to improve on the overall site design and interaction. I’m still a beginner when it comes to web design (I typed all the HTML and CSS from scratch), and my first try was a little bit less than inspiring! I won’t change any of the actual web addresses, I’ll just be improving the look of the already existing pages a bit.
Yes, as with all the planets in that library, you may use the render examples and/or .blend files in your own productions. You’ll just need to credit Chamberlin Productions and the authors of the various maps. If you’re making a space project, though, I would recommend building Earth for yourself, since you’ll learn more about Blender than you would by just using pre-made files.
I’m glad people are getting some good out of this project! I’ve added an appendix to the tutorial - it explains how to render a variation on the Blue Marble project. The variation follows NASA’s render more closely.