Hey guys! I tried to create a realistic Earth. If anyone has any critiques please post them :).
Original renders:
I altered the brightness and contrast a bit in this image to make it look a little bit more like something you might find online.
I altered the brightness and contrast a bit in this image to make it look a little bit more like something you might find online.
Maybe try a little bit more atmospheric glow, specular reflection(the highlight from the sun) and red-shift effect.
Thanks for the reply but when you’re talking about atmospheric glow are you referring to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airglow? or something else, I’m not sure. And I’m also pretty sure that you’re not supposed to be able to see the redshift effect with the human eye. Unless you’re referring to something else. It would be great if you could clarify what you mean exactly. I do know what you mean with specular reflection though so I will try that. 
Looks pretty good overall. In my opinion you could change two things to give it that punch we all look for.
- The colors seem a bit dull/de-saturated- nothing a bit of color correction couldn’t fix
- I noticed you added an atmosphere, but I think you could step it up a bit. As it is now the the world and space don’t blend together, it’s just one and then another. You could probably fake it with some glare (see the picture for what I mean), and if you want to go the extra mile, Blender Guru has a great tutorial on creating the earth.
P.S. a couple stars couldn’t hurt either
I think that the atmosphere is a bit too dense, but other than that, it looks amazing! Is the atmosphere a volume shaded object or did you use some trick?
Thanks! The atmosphere is a volume shader with a gradient texture.
Thanks Matthew P I’ll try colour correcting and maybe trying to cut the atmospheric gradiant of a little earlier. But I’m going to have to disagree with you on the rest of points 2 and “3”. I’m trying to create a realistic earth and the only tutorial I know about creating earth from blender guru is one about a stylized earth. Also you can look at any image from NASA and you won’t find any stars because they’re just way to dim compared to the sun. But thanks for the post and feel free to correct me on anything if you think I’m just spouting nonsense.
Thanks Matthew P I’ll try colour correcting and maybe trying to cut the atmospheric gradiant of a little earlier. But I’m going to have to disagree with you on the rest of points 2 and “3”. I’m trying to create a realistic earth and the only tutorial I know about creating earth from blender guru is one about a stylized earth. Also you can look at any image from NASA and you won’t find any stars because there just way to dim compared to the sun. But thanks for the post and feel free to correct me on anything if you think I’m just spouting nonsense.
If going for realism I wouldn’t add a glowing atmosphere. That kicks in at much lower altitudes, and in your shot you can see a whole continent indicating you’re pretty far away. Try to match earth from apollo missions or something rather than shots from orbit. If required, could be faded by distance so that it only shows when appropriate. I’m no expert though, and I’ve never been in space, so I could be wrong 
There is nothing wrong with going for beauty though.
I know, that’s why I didn’t add any glow. But I also don’t find atmospheric glow to be beautiful. I think the most beautiful portrayal of Earth or any planet for that matter is a realistic one. But thanks for the post.
Thanks. But I know how to use google.
it looks like what would happen if we dont start sorting out our CO2 problem
Also add a fresnel if you havnt already… i find it adds that extra 2% visually when you cant figure out whats up
On that photo you can see the Redshift effect i meant. (top, right).
It might be difficult to render that effect (and unnecessary), just fake it in post or in texture.
I personally would add some form of athmosperic glow.I think i can see it on most photos, its very faint like 2px, but its there.
I also like them.
Regarding the Sun specular i am not so sure anymore.
But I would play around with a subtle bump effect on the clouds to give them some volume.
Lol I’ll try lowering the atmospheric density. And I’ve already added fresnel. thanks.
Ok so that’s what you meant by redshift I was thinking of something else. And I’ve already added some very subtle bumb to the clouds but I’ll try stepping it up a notch. And I’ll look into adding some atmospheric glow mainly for low altitudes.
I’ve been working on some other stuff which I’ll probably be posting soon. So the updated Earth renders will be finished somewhere around next weekend. thanks for your advise everyone!
Just shows my planning skills.
As you can see the main thing I did was lowering the atmospheric density. The way I figured out roughly how dense the atmosphere should be was by actually moving the camera to the surface of the planet on the day-side and looking at the horizon. What I noticed was since the atmosphere was way to dense it looked like it was evening, mainly due to the crazy amount of redshift. So since there’s not supposed to be any redshift in the middle of the day I just lowered the density until all of the redshift had disappeared. I also changed the colour of the atmosphere to a blue colour that was a bit deeper and more saturated than what I had used before. And I changed the specularity on the ocean shader. I tried adding atmospheric glow but the only way I could make it look realistic was by making it pointlessly subtle. I cranked the bumbs on the clouds up a little but it’s still not really noticeable but neither is it in real images of Earth from this distance.
I used the famous blue marble image taken during the Apollo missions as a reference which I will a provide below.
My render:
Reference image:
Over all I’m pretty satisfied with this new render but if anyone can spot any flaws and a way to correct them please tell me.
And I’m probably going to try to recreate some other real life images of earth including my favourite Earth image from the himawarri-8 satalite. This should be possible ( if my image is realistic enough ) by just playing around a bit with the colour correction and things like that.
That looks awesome! The most realistic Earth in Blender I have seen. Can you give details about your final shader setup?
A thing I’d really like to see is a fly-around animation, with the camera spinning around the Earth without any changes in lighting.
Thank you very much! 
My Earth consists of 3 shaded objects and two empties: the surface object, the city lights transform (Empty which controls where the city lights will appear), the clouds, the atmosphere and an empty which controls the actual height of the atmosphere. And here are the materials I used:
Earths surface:
Clouds:
Atmosphere:
The “Reflective” shader group I used is a PBR shader based on tutorials from blender guru and CynicatPro.
I’ll try to make some kind of fly around animation but it will take a while since render times are quite long. I do have some idea’s to reduce the render time a bit though so maybe that will help.