Create a Realistic Earth

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Discover how to create a realistic earth using textures from NASA and the right know how.

Length:
34 minutes
Software:
Blender 2.5
Difficulty:
Intermediate
Rate:
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 4.8/5 (205 votes cast)

In this tutorial you will discover how to:

  • Use color, bump and specular maps
  • Add clouds and atmosphere
  • Use material nodes to create city lights in the darkness

With the complex terrain, ocean, clouds and atmospheres you’d think that creating a realistic earth would be quite hard to create… especially in Blender. But with the right know how it’s actually pretty easy.

In this tutorial we will be using several textures from NASA and some careful tweaking of materials to create realistic shaders.

Finished Result

Textures used in this tutorial:

All textures are from NASA but have been resized for easier use in blender.

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:


Further Inspiration

Not sure where to go with this tutorial? Check out these links for further inspiration:

Hope you found this tutorial useful. As always, if you make something cool, post it in the comments below!

Download the finished .blend Create a Realistic Earth, 4.8 out of 5 based on 205 ratings

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)
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  • HK

    Thanks a lot! Your tutorials are really usefull & easy. I added a sun and made bright with compositing.

  • Aman

    I hereby made it since 2 months ago,which is same as shown. :D

    I am very impressed from your tutorials, I had never missed your any tutorial.

    Here, I have changed the resolution.

  • Guest

    Well i think i did something wong, so here is my scene :

  • Guest

    Great Tutorial! Easy to follow. Did you make the Specularity Mask by yourself?
    Because i couldn’t find it on the nasa page.
    Btw this is my scene :-)

  • missnancy

    thx fr great tutorial! it also works in poser!
    to get lites to come on as it rotates, use diffuse node to detect whether sun is hitting surface.

  • ken

    yeah, i think the night lights .jpg file need to be reloaded on there

  • luc

    thx for the great tutorials

  • http://www.facebook.com/derrick.claywell Derrick Claywell

    Great video!! REALLY helped me understand texturing. Here’s my finished product :)

  • Talon Kosmoski

    Here is my finished product, I added the moon. Thanks a lot for the tutorial, I only started using a blender a week ago and this really helped me learn a lot of the different tools.

  • Blendor

    Here is my. I used Cycles renderer.

  • Wwza7

    I’ve been looking for tutorial like that one since Movie Competition – “the darkest is under lantern”…

  • Stephen Ritter

    Yay reconfigured it to Cycles looks better!!! :)

    • Krishna

      How did you achieve the Day-Night fading effect?
      I would really appreciate if you could post a node setup screenshot :)

      • Stephen Ritter

        Now I did have problems trying to get the lights dimmed during day-time, so in my final you can sort of see them, but it isn’t that bad. This first picture is of the Earth’s first layer.

  • Sam

    Not Columbus, but Magellan was the man who discovered that.

  • Michel

    Can you tell me why the clouds create that white shape around my world?

  • Gregory Beaver

    How the hell do you do the atmosphere with cycles renderer? All I succeed in doing is making the earth blue, no matter how big the sphere is. Fresnel just creates a band on the edge of the light, not around the sphere as a whole, and the light is on the surface of the earth, not in the atmosphere itself. This is the only thing I can’t get to work in cycles.

    • Krishna

      How did you achieve the Day-Night fading effect in cycles?.
      I’ve been trying for a while, but I just can’t seem to do it.

    • Stephen Ritter

      I know I am commenting on a old post, and I have put it on someone else comment, but this is how I did it.

  • Zensurist

    Thank you so mutch! Now i don’t need to by a Spaceship for this amazing View. Great! And now on my Desktop as Backgroud B-)

  • T.T.

    Great tutorial, heres mine

    http://fav.me/d5yy3wj

  • mrnoob1

    Hello,

    I like to use this earth in my own DirectX game. I exported this object as “.x” file as I always do. I resized all the textures to 2048×2048 size. Then loaded the mesh and the textures in DirectX but all I see is a green sphere within another blue sphere. No textures. Anyone can help please?

  • SYQuentin

    Here’s a version made with cycles.

  • SYQuentin

    Thank’s for the good tutorials here, i’ve taken this one as an inspiration. Here is the result done witch cycles.

  • Bullant

    If any one is having dramas with the line all around the planet from the atmos and the clouds.. go to the sun setting and and check ray shadow then check this layer only :) Top Knotch Blender Guru !!!

  • max

    hey, if you rotate the cloud sphere would the clouds rotate to?

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