Hi, I just started with Blender-- a total beginner to this program, though I have worked a little in 3D before… in Rhino and 3D Studio Max a few years ago…
I want to learn how to make a photo real Earth and orbiting satellite…
I have the texture maps and have read some tutorials for other 3D software-
If anyone is up to the challenge of helping me, with some step by step instructions, I would really appreciate it. This would be a great way for me to be introduced to the capabilities of Blender!
Assuming you now how to change you view, add a sphere by pressing space in top view (add -> mesh -> uvsphere).
Then select the sphere with right click (it should turn pink) in normal mode (toggle between normal and edit mode with TAB). Press F5 to get to the material buttons. click that little button with the white rectangle right to the display button to add a material.
Press the new button that also has a rectangle. It is below the little button with a car on it. This adds a texture to your material.
Then press F5 to go to the texture buttons. Click on ‘IMAGE’ and load your texture.
Go back to the material buttons, click on ‘sphe’ (in the middle of all the other buttons) and check what the rightmost buttons do. They control bump, spec, color, mirror,…
A material can have up to 8 textures, so click on another one of the top right buttons and add another texture for spec, bump,etc…
To make the sphere surface smooth, go to the edit buttons (F9) and click ‘SET SMOOTH’ when your sphere is selected.
I´m glad I could help you.
I will update my website soon and concentrate on the blender stuff. That one tut is not very much…
Well, Babelfish. ROFL. My Avatar is the Nabelfisch, because he looks as stupid as Babelfish translates… Check ‘Finished projects’ to see the final version.
If you do this use a better resolution for the clouds than
for the earth - mines sucks…
There is a blender trick to fake the outer atmosphere falloff
that someone posted many moons ago:
you put a mesh with a single vertex at the earth’s center
and a halo material. The material has to be quite hard
and you screw about with the halo size to get it to fit.
et voila
The only problem with this is that the earth’s center must always be in shot so that the halo is rendered
bout the resolution of the image maps. You might not want to go overboard. I have a map of the earth which is 10,000 pixels wide, but when i try to assign it in blender, it crashes. I think that’s because i had the thumbnail view turned on and that’s what had the problem, but if you don’t need the detail then don’t use it.
Was pretty cool though, i could zoom in totally on australia without any pixelation.
Also try www.space-graphics.com for some small (5mb) 10 k jpgs of Earth.
How do you turn off thumbnail view ? It crashes blender for me too when I try to load it.
Making the camera’s view centered on Earth is easy. Go to the constraint buttons (right next to edit buttons) with the camera selected, press add new, select “track to” if it’s not alreay, then choose the name you gave to Earth for the “Ob :” bit (most likely “Sphere”). Then you can move the camera wherever you like and it will always point at the centre of the Earth.
To make it pan slightly, you could track the camera to an empty (space->add->empty, an empty is just a point that can be moved around, it won’t show up in the render)-this will give you precise and easy control over where it’s looking.
It IS possible to do a good earth, just check out b5-blender.com to see what I’ve managed.
I know many here are begining to doubt that I’ll ever release my tutorial on how to do it, the fact is that I can’t write the tutorial until I’M happy with how it looks, and frankly, right now I’m not.
Do some searches for “Earth”, and or “Atmosphere”, they will get you started.
