I definitely did more post-pro than actual work in Blender, but I figured this is good enough for the Finished section.
Hey, after all, i did use Blender, and this is one of the best things I’ve done so far…
C&C welcome (I know about the pixely-looking clouds, i should prolly fix them…)
Oh, post pro included compositing a few different renders, and fixing some shadows and such from my poor lighting job
The dark atmosphere is a bit distracting and also a bit too defined, and the water is too monotone. Other than that it’s good.
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try the NASA Blue Marble maps.
decrease saturation by 50% once you have them, and they look great. 
Pretty similar to this one: http://www.digitalblasphemy.com/graphics/mthumbs/campfires2k2_xthumb.jpg
hey thanks guys, i’ll try what you said
on a side note, does anyone know how to make like a transparency map in GIMP2, so like if i had a black and white image, all of the white is opaque and the darker the shade of gray, the more transparent the pixel is? That’s where i had trouble on the clouds. (i could alternatively just do this all in Blender, but i need to learn GIMP also, so i figured this would be a good start)
Just make an image with alpha trasparency and save it as a format that supports it, like PNG. The click on “use alpha” in the texture buttons.
Not bad… I like it.
And the night lights on the dark side of the earth are a nice touch.
are the night lights part of the texture? I cant tell I am still a newbie with blender. 
I have been only using it for a weak now.
Actaully i did this the incredibly difficult way, as a sort of challenge .even though it turned out to not be that challenging…
Basically I made a render of the earth surface with 1 texture and a bump map, and a weird light setup. (I had “stars” on too, but only for this render)
then I changed the texture to the night lights one and removed the bump map, and rendered that
and then I scaled the sphere so it was ever so slightly bigger, then changed the texture to clouds (and used the same cloud image as a bump map), and rendered that.
The whole time I did not change the position of the camera or the lights
Then I opened GIMP and started chopping up the different renders and putting them together on different layers, changing certain ones’ transparency and whatnot. Then I did just a little bit of fixing (for example, the night/day line).
I just made a blue semicircle for the atmosphere, did some blurring trickery, and did a lighting effects technique similar to the one at http://gug.sunsite.dk/tutorials/itext2/
then i made it pretty transparent (like less than 45% i think), and saved it as a jpg (after saving as an xcf so i can edit it later)… voila, the picture.
B Manx2000:thanks, i’ll give that a shot
tris2004:thank you … yeah, it does take a little while to get used to blender (at least it did for me… theres even stuff people talk about here that i still have no idea what the hell it is), but once you get used to the basic stuff it goes quick, and you come up with all sorts of ideas for ways to do stuff. I’m currently being sucked into the game engine… not only because i have a school project that requires me to make a game of some sort, but because i want to learn how to use it.
I think you’ll find that most of the people here are pretty friendly, and give constructive comments and criticisms (although sometime people sound a little harsh, they’re only trying to help… unless they’ve just got something up their butt that day)
