Blender Tutorial: Realistic Earth

Blender tutorial showing you the surprisingly easy method to create a photorealistic earth. Using 100% Blender and some textures from the good ole boys and gals at NASA.

Download NASA Reference Photos:

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[J.R.WilliamsFilmMaker]

For those of you working through this on version 3.5 or later, the shadow pass is gone. So to fix this, you have to instead use a Diffuse Direct pass instead. It's the first option under the "Light" category in the Passes tab. You will need to tweak the blur amount, but that will get you back on track. The more you zoom out from the Earth by the way, the more you'll have to crank up the blur amount. Hopefully that helps! :)

[zanuarkjordan]

14:50 for those on the latest version of blender, I tinkered around for a good 20-30 minutes and my best substitute for there being no Shadow pass anymore is to use Ambient occlusion. I ran ambient occlusion through the blur filter and the color ramp and increased the percents on the blur filter. Its not as good as the Shadow pass, but it was the best I could get.

[navdeepsingh]

You are the one who teach me blender 10 years ago, happy to see my favourite earth tutorial coming back. Glad you are still doing this.

[Ziar]

1:17 Tip: In the scene panel there is a units menu where you can change the scale so you can use real-world measurements and not have to deal with floating-point precision issues

[saturnineNL]

I love this style of tutorial, step by step and no nonsense. Easy to follow with pause from YT after each step.
Every tutorial should be like this, too many tutorials just yada yada and explain too much noise knowledge.
If you can't understand a step, google is your best friend too. You sir earned a BIG like.

[harrytaylorgraphicshaul]

Just as I've finished designing, modelling and texturing a spaceship I find this beauty. Great work Andrew!

[Jakeurbty]

One of the main reasons I started learning blender was to make stuff like this. Super grateful for you putting this together with everything needed. The result looks spectacular and versatile.

[wauthethird]

Don't use UV spheres if you don't want warping at the poles. Subdiv smooth a cube, then Shift-Alt-S to invoke Mesh ‣ Transform ‣ To Sphere.
Then, to get the images displaying correctly, enable the included Node Wrangler addon, select the image node, and press Ctrl-T to generate the texture coordinate nodes. Finally, switch the output from the Texture Coordinate node from UV to Generated, and change the projection method of the texture to 'Sphere'.

[artemisDev]

you can actually just use a cube and use the length of generated coordinate as density for the atmosphere with a little bit of map range to make it more perfect

[guibson]

For those who didn't find the shadow option, you have to select Filter->Filter node and then set option from soften to shadow, link image output from your render layer node to filter image input, then link your filter image output to blur image input. After that you can follow the video. One last thing X and Y blur values can be different from tutorial.

[ericcarlsen]

Absolutely perfect timing. I need to make an earth and was literally just about to go through your much longer 2016 earth tutorial. Now I can use the latest and greatest methods in 25% of the time. You rock, Andrew!

[brickmack]

Most of this is fairly straightforward "how to make a planet in Blender" stuff common to most tutorials, but that compositing trick for the falloff on the atmosphere is a huge help. I've gone through dozens of tries at a solution for that (other than just doing it by hand in post) but this works way better than the rest

[LFPAnimations]

You can just tell that this had a lot of editing to get right. No fluff, step by step, and clearly as concise as you could make it. I got to admit sometimes I like the slower paced tutorials because we get a bit more info on each step, but man was this one efficient. Excellent work Andrew!

[Max_Mustermann]

Thanks a lot for the tutorial. Some additional things I found that could be useful:
-In order to apply the NASA textures to a sphere without distortions at the poles, it is possible to use an environment texture node inside a shader. It's a hack I found online.
-The brown tint in the area where the light meets the shadow can be reduced by adding a volume absorption node to the atmosphere material.
-The atmospheric falloff at the edge can be simulated to a certain degree by using a fresnel node. This can be combined with the compositor approach from the tutorial for better effect.

[pudding]

Its awesome to see just how far tools like blender how gotten and just how much more accessible imagine 20 years ago you told someone that the average person without much experience would be able to do something like this on their home computer in less than half an hour

[virgilhawkins]

To help with rendering speed, in Render view hit Num0 to get into camera view, then Ctrl+B and select a box slightly larger than your camera window. That'll set it to just render the selected area instead of everything.

[smpritchard]

The oceans appear blue from space not (exlcusivly) because of sky reflection, that's a common misconception. Water actually does have an intrensic blue color, but it's only really visible in large volumes like, say, a swimming pool.

[v-g-lant]

This man taught me everything I know ever since 2016 when I started my journey from pencil and paper to math and technology to create my artwork on another level I just want to say thank you again blender guru 👊🏾🧑🏾‍💻

[AM-lmev]

Awesome work as always!

Just a math tip when remapping the night-lights falloff. The dot product (when both of the vectors are normalized) will return values from -1 to 1 based on the difference between the vectors (1 for identical, 0 for perpendicular, -1 for opposite, etc), so for much easier control just plug the dot output into a map range with a From Min value of -1, a From Max of 1, a To Min of 1 and a To Max of 0. After that you can plug it into a ColorRamp and have complete and easy control of the falloff.

Thanks for all your tutorials, I never would have got started in 3D without that original donut!

[charlesskoutariotis]

I found the pitch black of the dark side of Earth a little odd looking, so some kind of duller fill light representing the moon wouldn't be out of place. I also wonder how much of the Milky Way would act as ambient light as well. As always, these are such fantastic tutorials - without this channel I would have never made the jump from Maya to Blender!