Well, I finally decided to register in this community. I turned lurker after the blender website shut down but now I’ll start back up again. Here’s a picture I made about a year ago. It’s part of a larger earth animation that I did for this guy’s church. Hopefully this will be on TV soon!
Cool,
I like it, and I like the atmospheric halo you used, very cool.
I might object that image is somewhat low in saturation, expecially oceans are much more gray than blue.
Also, clouds projects funny shadows! On america, for light, they should be exaclty below the clouds, on the atlantic they should be east of clouds, but they are in all case east of relevant clouds.
Moreover they are so distant! Clouds this way looks to be far high hundreds of kilometers!
This is funny and the only imperfections I can see in an otherwise great image.
Keep us informed
Stefano
In case you guys can’t see it, you have to go up to the url, and add space at the end, and then press enter.
Looks nice gyra5.
Did you use high resolution texture maps from NASA?
Cant wait to see the animation
brian
Thanks for the feedback s68. I hadn’t thought about the shadows for the clouds that in depth.
Here is a link for the earth maps. http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/earth.html
There are also maps for other planets and they are in a range of sizes. For this project I used to 10k earth map which took quite a while to load in GIMP and blender! The atmosphere was composited seperately with Axogon for those who care to know.
I am working on an earth shot from outer space also. I got the images from the same site, but I am having trouble getting them to work properly (i.e. the bumpmap, specularity, the cloud layer). Could anyone offer some help as to how you have to structure the set-up of these layers to get them to work properly? For instance, is there a certain order that they need to be in, etc. ? Thanks.
Do not double-post kirpre 
Stefano
My bad, won’t happen again.