Tutorial: Building Earth in Blender

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William Chamberlin has a great set of earth models on his site. He describes his creation process in a 20-page tutorial.


William wrote:

For some time now, I’ve been studying how to build Earth in Blender. I’ve read quite a few tutorials, studied NASA’s Blue Marble images, and received critique from other Blender enthusiasts. I now have some satisfactory results, which I’d be happy to share.

I’ve put together a 21-page tutorial which explains how I achieved my Earth renders. I know there are already a lot of Earth tutorials out there – but none that I found helped me get quite the effect that I wanted. My tutorial combines what I gleaned from all the other tutorials, with what I learned on my own through hours of experimenting. I’m sure it’s not perfect – but I think it will be helpful for anyone interested in the subject.

The tutorial focuses on three different models of Earth – a photographic-style Earth, a Blue-Marble-style Earth, and a night Earth. It demonstrates how to render details such as proper specular shading and ray-traced cloud shadows.

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    • Isernbreegen

      Wow, this is a great tutorial! Very impressive work, thank you so much!

    • http://isundae.com/ Malfhok

      Very cool! It looks like I can learn more than just Blender Earth from this, too.

    • Maurice Raybaud

      How beautyfull is our planet!
      On the site, there are mapped moon, jupiter, Io, etc. but I can’t find Pluto anywhere.
      Poor pluto…

    • http://www.makesweet.com/ Paul

      Awesome, this is great, just what I needed. Thanks William!

    • BlenderBoy

      I read Pluto has been nixed off the Planet list… sorry Maurice.

    • blendercross

      Very interesting TUT, thanks for sharing it!

    • http://www.tweakingknobs.com Tweaking Knobs

      Great tutorial , one of the best in quality i’ve seen in a long time

    • http://www.virtualmatter.org KevinW

      Great tutorial! and thanks for the credit. Job well done!

      –
      Kevin W

    • Tx_Rx

      Another Nice tutorial. Explanatory and impressive at the same time. Wow. Good work.

    • Leonardo

      Very informative, and it covers a lot of different things in Blender. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone looking to do an earth model.

    • Johnathan Endland

      That is the fairest render of Earth I’ve ever seen…

    • Moxab

      well lets not all submit an earth render to blender.org’s gallery at once!
      heh. cool tut though

    • http://chamberlinproductions.110mb.com William Chamberlin

      *cough*

      One comment – between the time I submitted this tutorial and the time it was posted, I made a couple of improvements and changed the number of pages. The current Earth tutorial is actually 20 pages long. Sorry for the inconsistency. . . :)

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @William: updated, thanks!

    • redbyte

      Tutorial looks very promising. Can’t wait to try it out!

      Thanks for giving something to the community William Chamberlin =)
      You rock!

    • Hal

      Having a hard time downloading the maps from your website. I can’t wait to get into this. Thanks!

    • Hal

      Nevermind, figured it out.

    • a user

      Thanks! BTW, I like this one too
      http://www.enricovalenza.com/realplan.html

      I would make use of both techniques.

    • Robert Zimmermann

      Hello William.

      Super design! Very impressive. Your work gave me lots of new ideas.

      Thanks…!!

      Have a great day..Robert.

    • http://www.ecommercetotal.co.uk Nikos

      One of the best tutorials out there

    • J

      I can’t download these maps! What’s going on? This looks like a beautiful model of Earth but I think my computer doesn’t recognize the file types on the NASA website, and all the links to the directory are broken! Help!

    • Celeron

      Hi William,
      thank you very much for your impressive tutorial. It was hard for me (I’m just newbie in Blender) to render your work, but at last I did it :-)
      But.. I have a question: why in the photo realistic rendering of the Earth I can see (in transparency) the non-rendered hemisphere (maybe the falloff texture). What is happening? This also happens with your blender project file (.blend). I use Blender v2.49a
      Thank you again for your work and your attention.

      P.S.
      @J: all the links contained in the pdf file tutorial must be completely copied and pasted in your notepad and then reassembled (don’t click the Acrobat Reader link…). Anyway here ( http://web.olp.net/wildernesslodge/ ) you can find all you need.

    • Fredrik

      The site is down. Does anyone know if the tutorial can be found somewhere else?

    • Simon

      I’m desperately looking for the toturial myself too – please upload it again someone

    • Gregg

      Can someone upload this tutorial again! Thanks!

    • http://colonize-the-moon.com moonus111

      I’ve been searching everywhere for this. It appears that the author’s website has been down for some time. Does anyone know where I could get copies?

    • Neil Kolban

      I too am looking for a tutorial on making the Earth … anyone? Author’s site is gone.

    • Gabe Ghearing

      You can still view them in the Way Back Machine, they even cached the blender files! http://replay.web.archive.org/20090617054240/http://www.chamberlinproductions.org/blenderearth.html