Detailed Render of the Earth from Space - Blender 2.5 - page 215

Remember to save the high-resoluion 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.

Preprocessing the Textures

The textures we downloaded are quite good, both in resoluion and in the way they clearly
separate each aspect of the shading of the earth. There is a catch though—using the clouds,
elevaion, and water/land textures as they are will cause us a lot of headache inside Blender.
So let's perform some beter basic preprocessing to get inalized and separated maps for
each channel of the shader that will be created.

Engage Thrusters
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.

Clouds Map
1. Drag the EarthClouds_2500x1250.jpg image from the tex folder into the

empty window of Gimp to get it loaded.

Now locate the Layers window and right-click on the thumbnail of the Background
layer, and select the entry labeled Add Layer Mask... from the menu. In the dialog
box, select the Grayscale copy of layer opion. Once the mask is added to the layer,
the black part of the texture should look transparent.
If we take a look at the image ater adding the mask, we'll noice the clouds seem
to have too much transparency. To solve this, we will perform some adjustment
directly on the mask of the layer.

2.