Planet Earth with 23-Page Tutorial (4th Edition)

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21

Due to copyrights, I don’t think that he was allowed to.

-Leonardo

22

The textures are huge files.
I think he got them from the NASA site.
There is another Tute Here:
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/-Earth-with-Clouds/35015
The textures are at the bottom of the page.
They are large files.
You can use these textures in the Earth tute from this thread also for best results.

23

Awesome, nice tutorial.

24

This is a great tutorial. Being lazy, I’m just taking the the Realistic Earth model and textures. I plan to use them in an animation.
I’m definitely going to credit you.

25

Thank you for this excellent Tutorial. Without too much trouble I was able to get similar beautiful looking renders as I saw on your site.

I want to use the Earth in a scene composed of other objects. I’ve decided I can either put together a blender scene or just green-screen the rendered Earth and add the other elements via photoshop. However, I noticed that whether I compose a separate scene or try to green-screen, the Earth actually appears to be partially transparent. That is, the green-screen comes through the planet. Likewise if I try to stick it into a blender scene with other objects, all the objects become partially transparent/translucent.

Is this an artifact of the render nodes being used? Do you know a way around this?

Thanks,

Lancer

26

LancerDL,

Yes, the node setup with the fresnel sphere is what causes the transparency effect. In the tutorial, there’s a note at the end of Part I stating that “if you ever render Earth on any background other than perfect black, youʼll want to use the Video Sequence Editor to alpha the Earth scene over the background scene. (Make sure that the Premul button is turned on instead of the Sky button, under the Render tab.) Otherwise, youʼll get some unwanted transparent effects when you render Earth over stars or anything else, because of the way the fresnel sphere is rendered.”

Hope that helps. :wink:

27

Thanks, awesome, wow!

28

Thanks for pointing me to that comment in your document.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to use the Video Sequence Editor to alpha the scene. Is it complictaed, or are there just a few simple steps?

Thanks again,

Lancer

29

Actually, I think I got it. Nevermind. :stuck_out_tongue:

30

I noticed a bit of a problem when I render using the VSE to put a star-field image in the background. I seem to lose the atmosphere glow sphere. Have you managed to get the glow to come through successfully using the VSE, and if so, how did you set it up?

Thanks,

Lancer

31

I’m not quite sure what you’re problem is. To double-check, I rendered a frame of Earth just now with a star background, and didn’t encounter any problems. Here’s how I’m using the VSE:

  1. Add an image sequence or movie into channel 1 of the VSE.
  2. Add the current scene into channel 2.
  3. Select the movie, then shift-select the current scene, then add an Alpha Over sequence strip into channel 3.
  4. Under Scene panel, turn on the Premul and Do Sequence buttons.

Render, and the Earth should look exactly the same, except for the background. If not, you could send me your .blend file, so I can see what’s wrong. You might have an incorrect setup with the nodes or something.

32

Thanks for your response Lego Animator, I apologize for the long delay. It seems I only get time to attack this project of mine every now and then.

I did much the same as you did, except I had the scene in channel 1 and the image in channel 2, and used the Alpha Under sequence strip. The good news is when I swapped them around, I got the right effect coming out. I guess Alpha Under and Over are different in ways other than their descriptions.

Thanks again!

Lancer

33

Thank you very much for sharing this. Nice tutorial.

34

this is an awesome tutorial! but i can’t get rid of these black polygons in the cloud layer render!

on the second layer i am supposed to put a cloud layer from a nasa cloud map. also, i am supposed to put three separate lamps into the five layers. lamp 1 goes to layer 1 and 5. lamp 2 to layers 2 and 4 and finally lamp 3 to layer 3. i turn on all of the lamp’s layer buttons and enable ray shadowing as well. all the lamps have the same lighting strength, rotation, etc. the tutorial says that i am supposed to constrain two of the lamps to copy the rotation of the third lamp, what does this mean? does that mean parent them to lamp 3?

also, when i go to render the cloud layer i get the cloud layer filled with dozens of large black polygons. this is a problem that i don’t know how to rectify. i think it has something to do with ray shadowing because when i turn it off the polygons disappear but the rendered image is not quite realistic enough. do you have any ideas on how to fix this problem? it’s driving me crazy!

35

Okay, let’s see here. I know how you feel - it’s what happens when the tutorial shows a great-looking render, but for some reason you just can’t get it for yourself.

Here’s my guess as to what you’re doing wrong: the camera’s Clipping Start value should be .1 (the default). If you change it to a really small number (like .001), you’ll get lots of polygons in the cloud layer. I’m not sure why, but that’s just the way it works. I found this out while working on a new model. I was getting tons of polygons, and I couldn’t figure out why. My new model was an almost exact copy of my old model (which worked fine), yet the render was a mess! Then I found out about my camera Clipping Start value.

Now if that’s not the problem, let me know. It’s probably something similar.

Let me give you a little tip - I’m in the midst of writing the fourth edition for this tutorial. None of the structure or look of the Earth models is really changed, but there are some very nice improvements. I’ll be uploading it in a few days. In fact, I state specifically in the new edition to leave the camera Clipping Start value alone. :slight_smile:

36

Oh man, that’s great!!

37

well thank you very much! i’ve spent all day trying to figure this one out and it turns out that the cloud sphere was not set to smooth so it had a lot of faces and edges still. but ofcourse i couldn’t see that. after fidgeting around with the controls i finally located the problem with the smoothness settings and sure enough the polygons disappeared when smoothed and were not rendered as a result. perhaps the camera clipping has something to do with it as well. but thank you for answering! i’m very much looking forward to your next tutorial. where will you be uploading it? i can’t access your website from china for some reason.

38

I’ll be uploading to the exact same link as the current tutorial, so you shouldn’t have any trouble accessing it.

By the way, you asked about the lamp constraint I mentioned in the tutorial. The way to achieve that is by choosing Add Constraint>>Copy Rotation from the Constraints tab in the Object panel.

39

At last, I’ve finished the new tutorial, and updated the original post!

40

Hey, why I can’t vote 5 stars twice?!