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.
Links
28 Comments
Wow, this is a great tutorial! Very impressive work, thank you so much!
Very cool! It looks like I can learn more than just Blender Earth from this, too.
How beautyfull is our planet!
On the site, there are mapped moon, jupiter, Io, etc. but I can't find Pluto anywhere.
Poor pluto...
Awesome, this is great, just what I needed. Thanks William!
I read Pluto has been nixed off the Planet list... sorry Maurice.
Very interesting TUT, thanks for sharing it!
Great tutorial , one of the best in quality i've seen in a long time
Great tutorial! and thanks for the credit. Job well done!
--
Kevin W
Another Nice tutorial. Explanatory and impressive at the same time. Wow. Good work.
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.
That is the fairest render of Earth I've ever seen...
well lets not all submit an earth render to blender.org's gallery at once!
heh. cool tut though
*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. . . :)
@William: updated, thanks!
Tutorial looks very promising. Can't wait to try it out!
Thanks for giving something to the community William Chamberlin =)
You rock!
Having a hard time downloading the maps from your website. I can't wait to get into this. Thanks!
Nevermind, figured it out.
Thanks! BTW, I like this one too
http://www.enricovalenza.com/realplan.html
I would make use of both techniques.
Hello William.
Super design! Very impressive. Your work gave me lots of new ideas.
Thanks...!!
Have a great day..Robert.
One of the best tutorials out there
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!
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.
The site is down. Does anyone know if the tutorial can be found somewhere else?
I'm desperately looking for the toturial myself too - please upload it again someone
Can someone upload this tutorial again! Thanks!
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?
I too am looking for a tutorial on making the Earth ... anyone? Author's site is gone.
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