Earth (Blender render)

Credits to NASA for providing PBR and HDRI textures for 3D artists for non-commercial creations.

 

Several images are used to create this Blend, among others a diffuse texture (basically a picture of the earth without clouds, relief or illumination), a normal texture (to create the relief), an illumination image (for the lights at night), a cloud image (to create a cloud layer) etc. It also requires setting up a few transparency masks so that you can prevent the illumination texture from showing up in the part of the earth covered by sunlight.

 

I had to keep an eye on the temperature of my Graphics card for this one. With low res images it is feasible but if you want to create more detailed relief, you need hi res images, and then my GPU temperature shot up. So I ended up making the thing in low res first, then in solid view I replaced the textures with higher resolution ones, and then briefly changed to rendered mode and quickly took a screen shot instead of rendering it out.

 

Recommended tutorial and credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdtTtzpCUg8.

 

 

 

Done