Before I get into another “accuracy” debate, are you trying to depict anything close to the actual situation of Earth viewed from space, or just whip up a glitzy pseudo-astro image using recognizable planetary textures?
I have to admit that its the second point you mentioned chipmasque but who knows where the image will end (i don’t :D).
It started more as an test scene for spacy materials and moved more or less in the disco colored corner. When i managed to controll the image colour palett to get a harmonic impression i will think about the final goal of this project. So the next step will be to create a nice “sci-fi like” lights texture for the dark side, then i’ll do the image colouring and after that… 
Loose the moon, it doesn’t work. The satalite needs some extra detail to make it as good as the rest.
Everything else is v.good.
Still no good results for the lights and thus i started to play a bit around with the colors.
Marcus you were absolutly right with the moon and phobos. The image gained quality by changing those two things 
update:
- colors
- moved spaceship to get the engine glow into the screen thus having an antipol for the bright sun
- added a tiny moonbase onto Phobos
- some other minor changes
Considering that Earth and Mars are right beside each other, no chance of accuracy
It’s shaping into nice eye-candy though! Planning on putting more bump or something on the Mars-analogue, I hope? It’s very bland. I like the ship, although, I’d think less sun/flare might be better.
And the sun flaring out from behind Phobos is unique, as far as I can remember!
Yes dgebel there will absolutly be something on the Mars-analogue.
update:
- sun
- lights on mars/earth
- added telescope on Phobos
- added tiny spaceships
- removed vector blur
- changed lighting of spaceship
- increased brightness of star background
That’s fantastic. The “howto” you posted isn’t there anymore (sigh) I’ve made a hundred planets but NONE have turned out so good. Check the attachment… you’ll see what I mean. I would reallly love to see how you did it 
If not… then could you tell me how you got the rainbow flare and your sun settings? The sun is so hard to replicate nicely using halos. I’d love to hear how you did it.
I’m currently doing a project requiring earth… and my version isn’t quite as nice as yours. (once again…)
(grins the grin of complete inquiry)
~Jace
Attachments
PLEASE MAKE A TUTORIAL! I Aboslutely need that information. I would love to find out how you did that. Ah man I want to make a collection of space wallpapers.
This is looking really great :yes:! The glowing and flare effects you have look nice and the Earth looks really good.
Some few things though, I would loose the lights on Mars, for some reason they just don’t look that great IMHO, instead, I would put more city lights on Earth, because right now they look a little sparse ;). The moon around Mars also seems to have some A.A. issues and the moon’s edge looks blurred around Mars’s atmosphere, did you blur the atmosphere in post pro?
Other than that it looks much better than your original photo.
Keep up the great work :).
Arrr, deleted the planet how to in a harddrive rampage some time ago so that one will take a bit :ba:, the sun howto should probably be pretty fast and i will post it in the evening.
For your planet jace i can give you some tips:
- try to use the fresnel sphere method to create the atmo, i tried it with halos but with a fresnel sphere you have more control and get nicer gradients (recognize that the atmo(turquoise) in my image hasn’t the same color as the sea(blue))
- the land/sea looks like its emitting, try to avoid that so you get a night side and a day side and when the day side is to dark increase the sun light energy
- i created the different planet spheres in different layers and used different render layers so i can control the endresult with nodes (especially the atmosphere with a rgb curve)
- always try to avoid pure black and pure white respectivly areas with no contrast/color change
Hope that helps. I wanted to write some stuff into your image so its clearer to understand what i mean…(bellow you see the result :yarrrr:
)
Vincimus tutorials will come
otto the lights suck i totally agree and i will work on them for sure. AA issue yepp haven’t figured out how to avoid it without loosing details on the earth cloud texture. About the blured edges (good observations btw ;)) they come from a chaotic layer-node setup and i have to tidy my .blend to avoid them :yeeks: but they will be gone in the endresult.
ps: thx for the flowers :o
Attachments
Hehe… nice pirate earth. Reminds me of the above Blenderartists logo Anyway, I’d still love to read the tutorial on how you did that earth. I came to a stopping point because I couldn’t seem to get the results I wanted. Yes, it is a single unified render. Each layer is a different sphere rendered together. Point me in the direction of using nodes to render. I’ve never done that before. Now, I did a version of Venus (attached) that turned out how I liked it (except for the freaking clouds) but I can’t get a full sphere of earth to look the same (yaaaarrrr) I’ll get working on it but I guess I need some more directions
Thanks!
~jace
Attachments
I started learning nodes with this and a project (but you obviously have that ;)).
Its also a big advantage when you have great textures. Awonderful ressource for really high res solar system textures is the forum of the http://www.shatters.net/celestia/. There you can eg. find a 32k!!! light map for earth. Created by idiots like the blender ones
Anyway i finished the sun tutorial (was more work than i thought…)
Sun flare howto
Hope its understandable and please ignore any language faults
Don’t know when the planet tutorial will follow but it will probably take some time (rl sshhheeessshhh).
where is the sun flare tut from? would be nice to see more things like that
This is looking pretty awesome. I was worried a while there with the extra space ships and moon, but now that you got some detail in, it’s looking pretty sweet. I like the little colonies you put on mars and the moon. Is this all from one render with no editing or anything?
I would love it if you made some more tutorials on how you did this. The sun flare one looked pretty detailed.
Keep up the good work.
Brilliant! That light tutorial was just what I needed. (I really wanted to know how you did the rainbows) I’ll be awaiting your earth tutorial with much anticipation. Thanks a billion!
I used celestia’s textures for my earth. You can’t beat BIG and FREE
Could I see a screenshot of the nodes you used? Each part is set on a different scene, and added together via the nodes and composite editor? I never thought of that. I’ll certainly experiment, as well as redoing my textures. (is there a limit for how big a texture can be? Ex: a 32k earth/cloud map? I’ll use the fresnel settings from the Venus map as well as your nonhalo idea. Gosh… I can’t wait for that tutorial 
~jace
Did you combine all those separate Celestia dds (I converted to PSD) files into one big map? That’s a lot of work? What link specifically did you get your 32k earth map?
Thanks
~jace
relledom: made in germany
nadaklan: one render, blenders internal, rendertime about 9,5min with a E6600 dualcore @3,1GHz :yarrr harrr:
Jace: I’m glad to see that the tutorial helps
> You can’t beat BIG and FREE
Sooo $%§&/"( true
I think your computer especially your amount of ram sets the limit for the overall used sizes of your textures. I’m using 5400x**** textures for this image. As there aren’t closups, it’s totally enough.
Forgot to give you this NASA link where i have my earth textures from. The mars is from here.
Putting those dds’s together would take hmmmm… let me calculate that… a million years?
In the nodes setup you can see one blur with x:0 and y:0 ignore that node.
@Zordan: That s great Then you could give me more of them 
Das ist toll Dann könntest du mir mehr davon geben
OH man, thank you so much. I was really getting bogged down with the nodes. I’ll work on mine a bit and see if I can get it looking better. I had forgotten about the ADD node. I’m a whiz with the Sequencing editor, and I realized that nodes are the same as the NLE blocks. Thanks for the bluemarble texture. I was worried that you were going to tell me that you went superhuman and stitched all those layers together. I’d give up on that idea for sure
I’ll work on this sucker for a littl ebit. Thank you so much for your help!!
~jace
EDIT: I have a question. Did you use the bluemarble land/sea/clouds map? Or did you map the clouds separately. Gosh you’re good. I can’t seem to get the color of the oceans and land and clouds to be as nice as yours Any tips?
(dude you rock. You can send me your bill later )