Second Edition

Building Earth in Blender

This tutorial demonstrates how a very realistic Earth may be built and rendered using
the Blender software. Weʼll learn how to
• build and render a photographic-style Earth which may be viewed from reasonably
close distances
• build and render a moon-lit Earth which may be viewed from reasonably close
distances
• build and render a “Blue Marble”-style Earth which may be viewed from very close
distances
I know there are already a lot of Earth tutorials out there - but none of them showed
me how to get quite the effect that I wanted. In addition (and this was frustrating to me), I
found that some of them did not fully explain how to achieve the perfect example renders
they sported. Hopefully, in this tutorial, you will learn how to achieve a nearly exact copy
of my example renders, pixel for pixel!
All of the textures used in these models are free. They come from NASAʼs Visible
Earth project. These are no-nonsense, high resolution textures.
In this tutorial, Iʼm assuming that you know the basics of the Blender software; how-
ever, Iʼm also assuming that youʼve never built a 3D planet before. Are you ready to get
to work? Weʼll start on page 3.

* * *
Part I
 Hereʼs an overview of how weʼre going to build our Earth
model: our planet will consist of five icospheres. The first ico-
sphere will be the land surface, the next sphere will be the cloud
layer, the third sphere will be the cloud shadow-casting layer, the
fourth sphere will be the atmosphere fresnel effect, and the last
sphere will be the glow of the atmosphere. Weʼll download and
apply some spherical maps to the spheres, and use the node edi-
tor to give the final touches.
The first step is to download the maps weʼll be needing.
Weʼll be using four textures for our first model. Two of them I
edited myself with the aid of Photoshop, so weʼll be download-
ing those from my own website.
With one exception, all of the maps I used in this project
came from this collection:

[Link]
&p=1

Topo Map
Iʼll now give some direct links. The topography map, which
weʼll use to give Earthʼs mountain ranges a bit of a boost, came
from this page (I used the “5400 x 2700 JPEG (645KB)” map):

[Link]

Next, weʼll need the clouds map, which can be found at this
page (I used the “8192 x 4096 TIFF (34.2MB)” map):

Cloud Map
[Link]

Finally, weʼll download two maps from my own website.

Both maps originally came from the Visible Earth project, but I
modified them in Photoshop to get the effects I wanted. For the
first map, I made use of the “replace color” tool in Photoshop
to edit the land and water colors; for the second map, I simply

Ground Map
down-sized a much larger map.

[Link]
8192%20(modified).tif
Mask Map

[Link]
20modified).png

The land map is a variation of the Visible Earth land map

found at this link (I used the “8192 x 4096 TIFF (31MB)” map):

[Link]

The mask (black and white) map is a scaled-down copy of

the “[Link]” map found at this
directory:

[Link]

Youʼll want to check the copyrights and terms of use of

these maps. I provide the necessary credits for all the maps at the
end of this tutorial.
Now that weʼve got the maps, letʼs make a directory in
which to store the maps. Make a new Blender file and place it
in the same directory as the maps (this will make linking to the
maps a little easier). Letʼs move to the next step: building the
planet model.

* * *

Open the Blender project and delete everything but the cam-
era. Press ʻnʼ key to open the Transform Properties, and give the
camera these settings:

LocX: 0
LocY: -39.07
LocZ: 0
RotX: 90
RotY: 0
RotZ: 0

Move the camera to layer 11 (press alt + 1 to enter). Weʼll

be using the bottom row of layers (11-20) for our cameras and
lamps. For now, weʼll want to show layers 1-4 as well as layer
11, in the 3D Viewport. Give the camera a Clipping End value of
5000.
Add an empty to layer one, give it a size of 10, and center
it at the origin (the center of the 3D space). Weʼll be using this
empty to animate/control our planet.
Now itʼs time for the planet itself. In layer 1, add in an ico-
sphere of subdivision 4 and radius 12. Make sure the sphere is
centered at the origin. Set it smooth, and give it a level 2 subsurf.
This will be the land surface sphere.
Duplicate the icosphere, and set the scale x, y, and z of the
new sphere to 1.002. Move the sphere to layer 2. This will be our
cloud layer.
Still in layer 2, duplicate the cloud sphere, and set the scale
x, y, and z of the new sphere to 1.003. Move the sphere to layer
3 - this will be our atmosphere fresnel sphere. Finally, duplicate
that sphere, set the scale x, y, and z of the new sphere to 1.008,
and move the sphere to layer 4. This will be the atmosphere
glow sphere.
Weʼll make our cloud shadow-casting layer a little later.
Parent the three outer spheres to the land surface sphere, and
parent the land surface sphere to the empty. Go ahead and give
the empty a RotX of -23.44 (the actual tilt of the Earthʼs axis).
From now on, we can rotate the Earth about its local z axis (by
rotating the land surface sphere) to simulate the planetʼs spin, or
about the global z axis (by animating the empty) to simulate its
orbit position. I used a RotZ (global) of -100 on the empty for
my western hemisphere render (as seen on page 1).
Since the Earth has been tilted on its axis, we need to tilt
the camera next, so we wonʼt get a “crooked” render of Earth.
I gave the camera a RotY of 15.437. While weʼre at it, letʼs add
the sun lamps for our planet. Add a sun lamp into layers 1, 2, and
4 (yes, the same object can be in more than one layer at a time!).
Use a rotation X of 90, a RotY of 0, and a RotZ of 47.317. Give
the lamp an energy of 1.3, with a distance of 5000. Turn on the
lampʼs Layer button. Make sure Ray Shadows are enabled.
Duplicate the lamp, and move the new lamp to layer 3. We
need two separate lamps because of the way weʼll split the lay-
ers using nodes. You can constrain the second lamp to copy the
rotation of the first lamp, to avoid any confusion. Weʼve finished
building our model; now itʼs time to give it some textures.

* * *

Weʼll start with the ground sphere. Add a new material, and
name it appropriately. Give the material a color of

R .122
G .145
B .200

Set the specular color to

R .791
G .821
B .889

For the shaders, use a Minnaert diffuse shader with a Reflec-

tion value of .6 and a Dark value of .325, with a Blinn specular
shader with these values:

Spec: 1
Hard: 50
Refr: 2.7

Turn the “TraShad” button on (this is important when it

comes to the shadows from the clouds).
We need three textures for our ground sphere - the ground
map, the topo map, and the mask map.
Add an image texture to the ground sphere, and load the
ground map. Give it a filter size of .1, and turn on the Min but-
ton. Weʼll do this for every image texture in our Earth models
from now on; it will allow us to render the textures with maxi-
mum detail, yet without getting an overly sharp image. We wonʼt
be using the imageʼs alpha channel - I found this produced some
distracting outlines on the edges of the land masses. Under the
Map Input tab, choose the Spherical mapping option. This will
map the image correctly onto our sphere.
Add a second image texture to the ground sphere, and load
the topo map. (Donʼt forget to set the filter size to .1 and turn on
the Min button.) Use the Spherical mapping option, of course.
Under the Map To tab, turn off the Color button, and turn on the
Normal button (hit it twice to turn it yellow). Set the Normal
value to .3. This map will give the mountain ranges an appear-
ance of being 3-dimensional. The Normal value is probably
exaggerated, since Earth is actually quite smooth when evaluated
from a distance, but I wanted a Normal value that would make a
visible (though slight) difference.
Add a third image texture to the sphere, and load the mask
map. I hope by now I donʼt need to specify that Spherical map-
ping must be used, the Filter value should be brought down, and
the Min button should be turned on. Under Map To tab, turn off
the Col button and turn on the Spec button (yellow). Change the
Texture Blending Mode to Multiply, and turn on the No RGB
button. This map allows the sunʼs specular effect to show on
Earthʼs water, but keeps it from showing on the land masses (this
is an important effect).
Next comes the cloud sphere. Add a new material, and give
it a color of

R .8
G .8
B .8

Set the specular color to white (actually the default).

For the shaders, use a Minnaert diffuse shader with a Reflec-
tion value of 1 and a Dark value of .8, with a Cooktorr specular
shader with these values:

Spec: 0
Hard: 35

Set Alpha to 0, and turn on Z Transparency. Turn off the

Traceable and ShadowBuf buttons. Set the SpecTra value to
.272.
Add an image texture, and load the cloud map. Under the
Map To tab, turn on Normal (yellow), and Alpha (the Color
should already be turned on by default). Set the Normal value
to .10. Turn the No RGB button on. Weʼre now ready for the
fresnel sphere.
Add a new material to the fresnel sphere, and give it a color
of

R .551
G .702
B .838

Set the specular color to white. Use a Minnaert diffuse

shader with a Reflection value of .6 and a Dark value of .805,
with a Cooktorr specular shader with these values:
 Spec: 0
Hard: 1

Set Alpha to .5 and turn on Z Transparency. Turn off the

Shadowbuf button. Here are the fresnel settings:

IOR: 1
Fresnel: .9
Fac: 2.3
Gloss: 1
Samples: 18
Thresh: .005
Limit: 100
Falloff: 1
SpecTra: 1

We donʼt need any image textures for this sphere.

Now for the atmosphere glow sphere. Add a new material to
the sphere, and give it a color of black with a specular color of
white. Weʼll be using a color ramp for this sphere; Iʼll provide
screenshots of the settings:

Use a Minnaert diffuse shader with a Reflection value of

.6 and a Dark value of 1, with a Cooktorr specular shader with
these values:

Spec: 0
Hard: 1

Turn off the Traceable and Shadowbuf buttons. Here are the
fresnel settings that need to be adjusted from the default (I actu-
ally donʼt think this makes any difference):

Fac: 1
Limit: 100

We next need to add the cloud shadow-casting sphere. Du-

plicate the cloud sphere, leaving the duplicate in the exact same
position as the original. For the shadow sphere, make a single-
user copy of the material. Turn on the Traceable and ShadowBuf
buttons. Turn off the Shadow button and turn on the OnlyShad-
ow button. Now, the sphere will cast the cloud shadows, without
being visible itself. Under the Map To tab, change the Var value
to .7. Now the shadows wonʼt be quite so dark (and now you
know why we needed a separate shadow sphere - so we could
make this adjustment separately).
 * * *

The only thing remaining is the node setup. We need to

divide our Earth scene into three render layers. Under the Render
Layers tab, name the current layer “A”, and set the layer ac-
cording to the screenshot at right. Then add two new layers and
set them according to the screenshots at right. Notice how that
layers 11-15 are selected - this is because I had various cam-
era angles in these layers. To render, only one of these layers,
containing a camera, plus layers 1-4, must be visible in the 3D
Viewport.
Next come the nodes. Iʼll just give a screenshot of the Node
editor (and this is quite similar to the node setup in the tutorial
by Kevin Whitfield):

Hereʼs what happens with the nodes: our first three spheres
are rendered, their colors are adjusted, the layer is sharpened,
and a vector blur is applied. The same occurs with the “B” layer,
except that a blur node is applied instead of a sharpen node.
Layer C (the atmosphere glow) is screened over the other layers.
Under the Scene panel, turn on the Do Composite button and
set the Sampling Filter to Mitch. Set the World color to black.
 Weʼre ready to render!
You can get some good close-ups with this Earth as well. For
the Africa/Europe shot I rendered, I changed the lamp rotation Z
to 40 and used these camera settings:

You can of course adjust any of the details of the planet to fit
your taste. If you donʼt like the look of the cloud shadows when
rendered from a distance, simply move the shadow sphere to an
invisible layer. You can also play around with the Alpha value
of the visible cloud sphere - try a value of .08 or so. Whatʼs nice
about this model is that it looks pretty good no matter the light-
ing angle. You can even point the lamp and camera straight onto
the model for a full-planet render.
Finally, if you want to add some stars, you might be inter-
ested in my star world tutorial:

[Link]

Important note: if you ever render Earth on any background

other than perfect black, youʼll want to use the Video Sequence
Editor to alpha the Earth scene over the background scene.
(Make sure that the Premul button is turned on instead of the
Sky button, under the Render tab.) Otherwise, youʼll get some
unwanted transparent effects when you render Earth over stars or
anything else, because of the way the fresnel sphere is rendered.
Next up: a night Earth!
Part II
 Weʼve taken care of the hard part of our Earth project - from
here on out weʼll just be modifying what weʼve already pro-
duced. For the night Earth model, weʼll be using the same set
of maps as the photographic model, except that the land surface
map will be replaced with a night land surface map. This map
may be found at this page:

[Link]

Night Map
Click on “Details and More Imagery” and you can see the
map I used, the “land_ocean_ice_lights_8192.tif” map.
Open the Blender photographic Earth project, and “Save As”
a new project. This will be our night Earth project.
Replace the ground sphereʼs land surface map with the new
night map. Under Map To tab, make the following changes:

• turn Ref button on (yellow)

• turn Emit button on

This is a neat technique which makes the Earth lights emit

their own light without reflecting much of the moonʼs light, giv-
ing them a consistent brightness whether the moon is shining on
them or not.

* * *

There are a few basic changes that need to be made to the

materials of the planetʼs spheres. For the sake of brevity, Iʼll just
insert some screenshots here, circling every item that requires
adjustment.
Ground sphere (specular color is R .292 / G .440 / B .646):

Cloud sphere* (no changes for the cloud shadow sphere):

*turn No RGB texture button off

 Fresnel sphere:

Glow sphere:

Glow sphere colorband:

Change the power of the sun lamp to 1.5. Next, add another
sun lamp into layer 4, and turn on the lampʼs Layer button. Set
the Energy to 2 and set Distance to 5000 (with ray shadows on).
This lamp will light the outer glow sphere. The idea behind our
night model is that the sun is directly behind the Earth, relative
to the camera. (Otherwise, some of the sunʼs light would illu-
minate a crescent portion of Earth, and our camera wouldnʼt be
sensitive enough to pick up both the weak Earth lights and the
sunʼs light.) Therefore, a visible outline is needed around the
Earth to convey this idea, and a second lamp is used to make
this outline visible. The only inconvenience is that this second
lamp must point in the exact same direction as the camera (if the
camera is pointing at Earth anyway), to work properly.
After adding the new lamp, give it these rotation settings:

RotX: 90
RotY: 0
RotZ: 0

These settings will work when youʼre rendering with the

camera we first inserted into layer 11.
 * * *

There are a couple of adjustments which need to be made in

the Node Editor. Change the curved RGB curve nodes to look
something like the screenshot at right. Also, change the value of
the final Screen node from 1 to 0.5.
In order to see how the lamps and lights interact, set the
RotZ of the Earth empty to 180, and change the RotZ of the
lamp in layer 11 to 90. Render, and youʼll get what in my
opinion is a pretty good-looking moon-lit Earth! It may not be
scientifically accurate, but I think it makes a nice effect.
Coming up: the Blue Marble!
Part III
 We come now to the final module of our Earth project. This
time, weʼll be modeling Earth after the Blue Marble. Weʼll also
be upgrading our standard map size to 21600x10800 pixels!

Topo Map
Download the 21600x10800 topo map from this page:

[Link]

Download one of the 21600x10800 “Blue Marble Next Gen-

eration w/ Topography” maps from this page:

[Link]

Ground Map
&p=3

NASA offers 12 different maps, one for each month of the

year. I used the July map. Youʼll have to go to “Details and More
Imagery” to see the “ [Link]”
map I used. In case youʼre wondering what the 21600x21600
maps labeled A1-D2 are, Iʼll explain. Put all eight of these maps
together, and youʼve got a really huge Earth map! We wonʼt be
using this option. . .
Next, download the “[Link]”

Mask Map
map found at this directory:

[Link]

Weʼll be using the same cloud map we used before (donʼt

panic!). For your information, there is a 2-part giant cloud map
which may be found here:

Cloud Map
[Link]

However, this map lacks data around the poles, and the edg-
es of the two halves donʼt link together correctly, so we wonʼt be
using it. Hereʼs what weʼll do: weʼll use the smaller cloud map
the same way weʼve been using it, for our more distant renders;
for super close-up shots, weʼll need to save a separate Blender
project and use a special cloud technique.

* * *

Weʼll begin Part III with our Blue-Marble-from-a-distance

model. Again, weʼll start by saving our photographic Earth
project as a new project, and modifying the new project. In the
new project, replace the old ground, topo, and mask maps with
the high-resolution ones. (Note: If your computer and Blender
can handle all those maps without crashing, good for you. I had
to scale down the topo and mask maps to 10000x5000 pixels
each.) Set the Reflection value of the fresnel and glow spheres
to 1. Make the following changes to the materials of the ground
and cloud spheres:
 Ground sphere (spec color remains the same):

Cloud sphere: (turn No RGB texture button off)

Set the energy of the sun lamp to 1.5. Make the same two
adjustments in the Node Editor that we made for the night Earth
model. Now you can render and enjoy the benefits of the high-
resolution maps! A render of the full planet at 4-5 megapixels
looks really good (in fact, our other models can be rendered at
this size, and still look decent). Compare the example render at
right to NASAʼs official Blue Marble image. I obviously wasnʼt
going for an exact match (the main difference between the two is
the atmosphere effect), but I think it looks good.
Try a close-up render, and youʼll start to see the true benefits
of the big ground map. The problem is, we canʼt get too close to
Earth before the low cloud resolution starts to show. Thatʼs when
we need to switch to the following variation for close-up renders
only.

* * *

Save the Blue Marble project as yet another project. We only

need to make five adjustments, but they are important.
First, set the Alpha of the visible cloud layer back to 0. Un-
der the Map To tab, set the Var value to .75.
Select one of the cloud spheres, and change Xrepeat and
Yrepeat to 10 (the other cloud sphereʼs settings should change
automatically). This allows for close-up shots of the clouds
(though Iʼm not even pretending to make proper 3D use of the
cloud map here!).
Youʼll want to set the subsurf level of all the spheres to 4 (or
higher). Set Layer Cʼs blur node X and Y values to 35.
Thatʼs it! Try the camera and lamp settings at right to get my
example render. As with any of these Earth models, you should
be able to render over any background, as long as you followed
my instructions in Part I.

* * *

Here is the link to my Blender Earth homepage, where you

can download all the .blend files and example renders used in
this tutorial:

[Link]

If you have any questions or difficulties concerning this tuto-

rial, you may e-mail me at the contact link on my website.

* * *

Here is the credit information for the maps weʼve used:

“NASA Terms of Use:

For all non-private uses, NASAʼs Terms Of Use are as fol-
lows:

1. The imagery is free of licensing fees

2. NASA requires that they be provided a credit as the own-
ers of the imagery

Visible Earth Addendum

Beyond the NASA Terms, the Visible Earth team requests,
but does not require:

1. The Visible Earth be provided a credit as the location that

the imagery was found at
2. A URL be provided, either to the Visible Earth (http:
//[Link]/) or to the page providing the link to the
used image.”

Iʼm assuming that the mask map is governed by the same

terms of use as the other maps (since it was found in a location
separate from the others).
Also, please credit me for my work in editing the photo-real-
istic Earth map. Thanks!

* * *

I hope this tutorial has been helpful. It has taken me a long

time and a good amount of work (Iʼm writing at 2:20 AM right
now) to develop these projects, so I hope someone can get some
good out of them!

William Chamberlin
Appendix
 In this section, weʼll make a few changes to the Blue Marble
Blender file, in order to get a variation of Earth that is quite simi-
lar to NASAʼs official render.
Open our Blue Marble project, and save as a new project.
Give the two cloud spheres a Reflection value of .7 instead of .6.
Make the following changes to the fresnel sphere material:

Blender Render NASA Render

Add a colorband as follows:

Make the following changes to the outer glow sphereʼs

colorband:

There is only one necessary change to the node setup:

 Now youʼre ready to render. For a close-up shot, we need
to make the same five changes to the model that we made in our
earlier project. Also, youʼll want to change the cloud sphereʼs
reflectivity back down to .6, and adjust the blue color bands of
the outer glow sphere. I used a color of

R: .364
G: .553
B: 1

for both bands.

Finally, change the next-to-last screen node value to .8.
Of course, there are many possible variations you can make
on planet Earth - just go wherever your creativity takes you!
You can also use these planet techniques for many other planets.
Iʼve built all eight planets as well as several moons, using free
textures available on the web.