Well, trying my hands on a earth model:
Large (1920x1200)
http://www.gods-inc.de/barbie/3d/earth8.jpg
That is absolutely amazing! Very nice hi-res image map. Love the texturing, including the clouds.
The only thing I would suggest adding is a thin haze at the edges for the atmosphere.
yeah… um… wow :o
good work with that, but I agree, you need the atmosphere line/haze to make it perfect.
with the introduction of ray tracing to blender, there is an easy way to do it:
create another sphere (dulipcate what you have) delete the texture and increase it’s size to 1.020 or 1.030 (or in between depending on what you want). Also, move it to another layer and add a light to that layer that only affects that layer. Also change your current lighting to hit whatever layer the current image(s) are on.
Now give the texture a light blue color and goto the ractracing menu and select ray-transparent and set the fresnel up to about 3 and leave frac at 1.25. Now you can adjust the fresel setting to get what you like, but select all the layers, and render with ray tracing on and then you have the realistic fresnel effect glowing around your planet.
There are other ways that give arguably better results, but this way is quick and pretty effective without adding a lot of rendering time to the project.
However, this method and Yafray don’t always get along.
There is a fresnel effect for the atmosphere present, and its done exactly the way suggested.
See for comparison this earth shot from space:
The atmosphere effect is not that strong in reality.
Auralis, this is beautiful work. Is your high-poly ship going to drop into orbit?
The stars / galaxy give the scene a nice sci-fi look. If you’re going for photoreal, I don’t think stars show up on normal photos of dayside Earth.
CD38: that was the intend for doing the earth yup 
Yeah, i know, in space normal cameras see no stars.
Woah. :o
Where on earth (no pun intended) did you find that map? Love the detail of the city lights.
/me points Soter to the url in the bottom left
I wanna know too, and I’m sorry, but I have no clue what you are talking about!! :o
Look at the bottom left corner, right below the “Earth - M Class - Planet” thing think it was space-graphics.org and nasa
Very nice, i bow to thee
all: thanks guys
indigomonkey: Simple spherical mapping to object. And then as object the different layers of the globe.
I tried UV mapping, but blender puked on the mapes and getting the UVs to even remotely into a flat shape was impossible.
Nice Earth.
I would, however, suggest adding at least a faint blue glow to the rim of the planet. It’s not necessarily something you could see from that far away, but it will add to the mood of the image quite nicely. 8)
-Obiwan
That was already discussed early… from that far, the atmospher isn’t visibal, ask nasa if you dont trust some random guy from the internet
Hehe, yeah, I know, which is why I said. . .
The main point I was trying to make was if he’s not going for 100% realism (and since he already seemed to make a comment about not really aiming for that), I would suggest at least trying a small atmosphere, just to see if he liked it.
-Obiwan
So, did you use the square images but spherical map them? Was that tricky? Or am I being stupid by not being able to see non-square images on that site? 