This popped up in my feed and I’d been looking for a tutorial that would stretch my new 3080 so, I had a go.
I got some decent renders. His were taking about 14 seconds, mine were taking 50 seconds on average, so that’s not too bad. There are some nice cloud/mountain shadows going on near the terminator.
BUT since he’s using a low poly UV sphere as a base, I was getting UV seams at the ‘pole’ of the cloud layer.
Here’s the UV map.
Anyone else finding this or have I missed a step?
i have in the past , i solved it by using a higher count subdivided mesh
I don’t know the tutorial, but this is normal for a default uv-mapped sphere. It has two poles, and it’ll pinch – you can see on the UV map that the triangles leave out a lot of the texture there.
It’s easy to get around if you only need this for renders in Blender, not export it to a game engine or other software using this model.
Go to your shader graph (Node Wrangler add-on enabled), select the Image Texture of your Earth, and press CTRL-t. That will add a Texture Coordinate node and a Mapping node to the left of the Image Texture. Change the Texture Coordinate output to Generated. Change the Image Texture projection to Sphere. That’ll do it.
If you need to export this to a game engine, you need to bake.
There was this trick to just cut the triangles very close to the poles and slide the edges… wait… here:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3315/how-to-get-perfect-uv-sphere-mercator-projection
If only the Earth was flat – all of this would be so much simpler!
Actually it is… prove: any page in an atlas…
Blender Bob has just released his own take on a realistic Earth tutorial, referencing the Blender Guru one. the first thing he does is correct the UV mapping. 
There are some other nice touches/embellishments he does that I’ll go over with mine.
But if he bakes the map with the correct projection it will be fixed, no? So, after baking isn’t possible to use in other software and games?
Why would you bake for use elsewhere? The methods used are special to Blender and you’d have to come up with other approaches elsewhere to achieve the same effects. It’s in essence a sphere with a map, not the hardest thing to achieve in any software or game engine I’d assume.
For starters, Blender has many purposes besides rendering. So, if you need to use your model elsewhere you should know how to be perfectly capable to create a model adapted for any purpose.
Basically, following a tutorial does not define the objective of a particular model and if what the person needs is to export the model for selling or any other purpose, that would be another problem to deal with. And I see no problem with talking about that.
If you sell a model anywhere are you going to tell your future customers: look I did not bake the textures in order to be used in your software or game engine, so find a solution yourself?
If the objective of the model is for selling or to use anywhere else I just thought It would be good to tell that baking solves that problem after that projection is corrected.
Anyway, even for exclusive use in Blender, if after that you decide to make any texture painting, it will not be possible if the texture is not baked, so, what’s so bad about baking or talking about that?
I’m still not really sure I got the point of your message. Starting by: Why would you bake for use elsewhere?
Selling a sphere with super high quality public domain and completely free images acquired from NASA would to me be an absolute low point. Legal? Of course. But still highly questionable, and a seller I would block.
I’m talking only about this particular example, a simple sphere that anyone can create in whatever package they use. The full set of high res textures in all size options gets to a whopping 22GB.
That’s why some people can’t think outside the box when they follow a tutorial. 
Where you see a model I see a lesson. Sorry for you.
I am not talking about THIS particular case, but about what is there to be learned. If you follow a tuto about how to make an earth model and are unable to think further, that’s your problem.
My concern here is the possible techniques and their eventual use in other cases, that’s what I think is the objective of a tutorial. Like making the stupid donut of Blender Guru is not about baking donuts, but learning techniques.
This wasn’t about the value of a tutorial, but the usefulness of baking textures to a sphere when more appropriate ways of mapping likely exist in other packages. Tons of way more appropriate tutorials covering that aspect.
Yeah, I think I’m done. Take care.
