I’ve created a realistic earth in Blender that anyone can download.
Layers:
*Color
*City Lights (can be turned on/off with IPO curves)
*Bump map
*Specularity
*Clouds
*Atmosphere
Sunny side
Night lights
Download the blend file (3.7 MB with textures)
http://www.orst.edu/~dennisa/Blender/Earth.blend
cool, and thank you… is there any quick tutorial possible? just a quick, “this is how I uv mapped it” this is how I got the atmoshpere…
just curious… thanks! preciate it
Wow. That’s mighty amazing.
I was curious, because I have some high resolution images, from the nasa website…
I started off by searching on Google for Wallpaper sized images for “Earth Texture”. I found this site Http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps.htm which contains all the image maps that I used. I made sure they are freeware.
I then wrote down the layer order that made the most sence (terrain on bottom with atmosphere on top). I then created a fairly dense UVSphere in Blender (64x32 I think) and UVtextured the colormap on it with the standard sphere mapping.
From there I added each of the textures in the order I decided on earlier, choosing the ‘UV’ texture method in the Material buttons. The color map was applied to Col, the height map was applied to Nor, the water map was applied to Spec, and the city lights map was applied to both Emit and Col. Because I couldn’t control the city lights individually from the rest of the textures, I duplicated the earth sphere, sized it up, and applied only the light map to it. This way I could adjust the emit level through the Emit IPO curve.
I created another outer sphere and applied an atmospheric type material to it. I used the same texturing method I use for glass that makes the material more transparent when the face’s normals are facing you, and more opaque when facing perpendicular to you. Using reference photos of the earth, I adjusted the distance of the atmosphere from the ground (often over-exaggerated) and it’s color. The atmosphere has a slight emit value to it (because the atmosphere refracts light nearly all the way around the earth).
Lastly I adjusted the specularity values of the Earth’s terrain and the water so that they would look natural. I adjusted the specularity color to be slightly yellow-orange also.
I used a spotlight for the sun with shadows enabled so that the atmosphere on the opposite side of the planet wouldn’t be lit up. I turned off “Traceable” in the atmosphere’s material settings so it wouldn’t cast shadows (and therefore make the Earth black). The cool side effect of having a separate atmosphere mesh is that it ‘catches’ the light of the sun just as the sun’s going behind the planet, creating a sunset effect.
My advice would just be to look at the different material and texture settings I used. The atmosphere material is especially usefull for creating various things such as glass and plastic (However with glass you’d want to turn up the ‘SpTr’ property)
wow, thank you for the tutorial, you’ve really helped out for future referrence 
and on that note… it :o 's pretty good… I’m glad you took the time and effort to make this for me, and the fellow blenderists, and I appreciate the time you took to make that wonderful, easy to understand tutorial no spelling errors! congrats! for us…
Thanks!
DMBadCat
You are a genius. Cheers!!
looking just marvellous, great earth.
thanks a lot for sharing it with us.
good job
Wyvern
Thanks both for file and tut. Great, man [!]
vosa
heh, not bad. few things need a little work.
mainly the spec and freshnel effects, spec is WAYYY to high, and freshnell, if there, is way to low. Another is getting clouds to cast shadows, which was a royal pain. (Add the cloud texture to the land texture and subtract it, thus it makes fake, but good, shadows)
also, use the NASA Blue Marble maps, which need to be color corrected. (Desaturate the color map by 50% works well)
if your interested, I have my Earth model, sans the huge textures, available for DL, it may be useful to some.
http://www.b5-blender.com/files/earthproject.zip
still working on my tutorials on the Freshnel effect, and the big one on making earth from scratch…
Good job man, keep of the great work.
Great!
Thanx for sharing
Stefano
(Now, wat about animating those clouds 
? )
I like this! However – dumb question … which things are on which layer? I can’t find the lights.
:o :o :o :o :o
Uhhhh…ummmm…wh…wh…wh…wooooowwww. :o
That has to be the best thing I have seen yet. I would without doubt, think this was real if you didn’t state otherwise. It’s stunning. Really excellent work.
10/10.
-three-dee
very good I like that, but canada has more lights then that :x
Great job but, it does look a bit too shiny!
Does anyone still have this Free earth blend.?!?!
I need it pretty quick and pretty bad …
hmm ya my webpage was taken down unexpectedly (without being able to backup my files at all GRRRR!!!) However, I still have it on my work computer so I’ll post it again on an alternate site on Monday.
thanx in advance
Why can’t I download it? it’s gives me the 404 erorr page!
oppps didn’t read the whole stuff 