Challenging and fun projects that will push your Blender skills to the limit
Our purpose is to create a very detailed view of the earth from space. By detailed, we mean that it includes land, oceans, and clouds, and not only the color and specular reflection, but also the roughness they seem to have, when seen from space.
For this project, we are going to perform some work with textures and get them properly set up for our needs (and also for Blender’s way of working).
We will create a nice image of the earth resembling the beautiful pictures that are taken from orbiting of the earth, showing the sun rising over the rim of the planet. For this, we will need to work carefully with some textures, set up a basic scene, and create a fairly complex setup of nodes for compositing the final result.
In our final image, we will get very nice effects, such as the volumetric effect of the atmosphere that we can see round its rim, the strong highlight of the sun when rising over the rim of the earth, and the very calm, bluish look of the dark part of the earth when lit by the moon.
With this project, we are going to understand how important it is to have good textures to work with. Having the right textures for the job saves lots of time when producing a high-quality rendered image.
Not only are we going to work with some very good textures that are freely available on the Internet, but we are also going to perform some hand tweaking to get them tuned exactly as we need them. This way we can also learn how much time can be saved by just doing some preprocessing on the textures to create finalized maps that will be fed directly to the material, without having to resort to complex tricks that would only cause us headaches.
One of the nicest aspects of this project is that we are going to see how far we take a very simple scene by using the compositor in Blender. We are definitely going to learn some useful tricks for compositing.
This project will be tackled in five parts:
The very key for the success of our project is getting the right set of quality images at a sufficiently high resolution. Let’s go to www.archive.org and search for www.oera.net/How2.htm on the ‘wayback machine’. Choose the snapshot from the Apr 18, 2008 link. Click on the image titled Texture maps of the Earth and Planets. Once there, let’s download these images:
Remember to save the high-resolution version of the images, and put them in the tex folder, inside the project’s main folder.
We will also need to use Gimp to perform the preprocessing of the textures, so let’s make sure to have it installed. We’ll be working with version 2.6.
The textures we downloaded are quite good, both in resolution and in the way they clearly separate each aspect of the shading of the earth. There is a catch though—using the clouds, elevation, and water/land textures as they are will cause us a lot of headache inside Blender. So let’s perform some better basic preprocessing to get finalized and separated maps for each channel of the shader that will be created.
For each one of the textures that we’re going to work on, let’s make sure to get the previous one closed to avoid mixing the wrong textures.
The purpose of this curve is to get the light gray pixels of the mask to become lighter and the dark ones to get darker; the strong slope between the two control points will cause the border of the mask to be sharper.
The purpose of creating this specular map is to correctly mix the specularity of the ocean (full) with one of the clouds that is above the ocean (null). This way, we get a correct specularity, both in the ocean and in the clouds. If we just used the water or land mask to control specularity, then the clouds above the ocean would have specular reflection, which is wrong.
The bump map controls the roughness of the material; this one is very important as it adds a lot of detail to the final render without having to create actual geometry to represent it.
Notice that we are mixing the bump maps of the clouds and the mountains. The reason for this is that working with separate bump maps will get us into a very tricky situation when working inside Blender; definitely, working with a single bump map is way easier than trying to mix two or more. Now we can close Gimp, since we will work exclusively within Blender from now on.
This part of the project was just a preparation of the textures. We must create these new textures for three reasons:
Notice that we are using the term “bump map” to refer to a texture that will be used to control the “normal” channel of the material. The reason to not call it “normal map” is because a normal map is a special kind of texture that isn’t coded in grayscale, like our current texture.
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