Yep, another Earth tutorial in Blender.

Blender Guru's Earth tutorial:

[shawnhollahan]

I love that you Contacted Blender Guru before making this video. It shows you have a lot of class. Excellent and simple solution too. !!

[Methbilly]

Both methods are very useful to know. Using volumetric for the atmosphere makes it look amazing, great light scatter effects for close up shots too, however it can be hard trying to indirectly control how it all looks. Meanwhile your method saves a lot of render time and noise, so its probably better for animations, and is also more artistic being able to alter the look more directly.

[I_am_Spartacus]

Hey Bob, love this new approach, especially the atmosphere... though, I should point out that for some reason, most people seem to blame the UV sphere for the pole pinching, when in fact its peoples lack of understanding about the image maps you are using from NASA... they are called equirectangular maps and are specially created to be used with UV spheres, you just need to use the map with the Environment Texture node, set it to Smart and then set Tex Coord to Object, bingo, no pinching and no phaff :)

[KevBinge]

Damn creative on the lights/cloud interaction. Great video!

[polynormal]

Your tutorial was more thorough, I actually learned some interesting techniques from your tutorial. Thanks for sharing.

[raulgalets]

you know, I noticed the pintching in the poles in the blender guru tutorial. my fix is: I made a perfect quad sphere and shrinkwrapped the uv sphere on top of the quad sphere. worked pretty well. I did this cause I had already done the full tutorial and it was the easier way for me.

edit: your method is really goos, I followed your tutorial alongside blender guru's and what I`ve noticed is: the weird effect that occurs when clouds instersect mountains and it kinda clips is more noticeble.

[Kram]

the Generated Coordinates trick is genuinely great
The pinching can also be fixed with a Cast-to-Sphere modifier. But really, the best method is to just directly use enough geometry from the start. Or you can start from a cube, subdivide that a bunch, and turn *it* into a sphere. There is an addon for that too I think. One that ships with Blender, adding a bunch of new base objects including that

[Leukick]

Amazing for Science Fiction! To be like real life though it needs to be completely flat, with a vast ice perimeter holding in the level water

[billmurray]

Great video, especially the part about the atmosphere and clouds, thanks a lot!

[NirmalveerSingh]

9:30 "Insert flat Earth joke"

[BlenderBob]

You can also mix them. Both atmospheres at the same time!

[phalhappy]

you can try this to fix the bending by scaling image up and down and set method to bicubic. it will blur the bending line.

[norbertszalko]

Bob you are amazing! I really appreciate you showing us your own way of working! I saw the amazing looking sun in the trailer of the end is mye and I would like to know if you could show us that too? :)

[vintezis]

i'm watching the other one first, please wait a little bit more... wait... wait... ah, i said wait!

[RomboutVersluijs]

What would ala be sick if we could add Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis as well. Thats something I've never seen as well in these shots.

I made the closest d material have some translucency so the city light texture would influence it as well. I didn't need that setup you talked about. Though your setup with the fading edge using layer were GHT is really great. I would make that a node group since it seems the same setup is used a couple times, that will make it easier to adjust it in each setup

[GaryParris]

Really nice work BlenderBob :O) there are others who did earth tutorials before Guru's recent one, and its also pretty good, its by YouTube'r Ryan King Art may 2021

[gottagowork]

Some comments:
1) Some footage from low orbit shows the atmosphere in a very white glowy fashion even if it fades to blue nothingness.
2) Aurora borealis only covers the "illumination poles", so might want to mask out that, and maybe animate it as well. 4D generators for the win, modulate everything with time.
3) Not sure if it applies anymore, but in the past I've had issues with sphere projection and ended up using environment mapping (x * -1) instead.
4) If you need infinite resolution without the cost of infinite geometry, say for proving flerfers wrong, there is the option of doing geometry nodes and a single point with a radius. It has many limitations, like can't be blended/overlapped/displaced (most likely), but it's nice to know what other venues can be available.
5. There was a VSE optical lens flare addon (channel cgvirus) years ago that was immensely cool to play with. Not sure if it still works or if better ones have arrived since.
6. Using fresnel is technically wrong since this isn't about specular reflections. You can make it work of course, but I'd probably start with layer weight/facing or a trig function on that which spaces it out more evenly for easier tweaking.

[RomboutVersluijs]

Very cool version! I remember the initial tutorial he did years ago, i did the tutorial but used a different render engine. I was super nice!

Ps i believe the northern light is not that green edge you showed near the end. The northern light is only visible around the poles of the earthe due to the magnetic forces, i believe they are ions which enter the atmosphere. Guess the green edge is refraction of light. But I'm not sure about that

[MusicalGeniusBar]

Did god sponsor all the earth tutorials on YouTube 🤔

[harem]

i think to do a earth shud practice terrain water and clouds sun reflection and shadows or heighten map on the clouds