Detailed Render of the Earth from Space - Blender 2.5 - page 220

Layers: 1 (disable any other layer, Relations panel)

3. To get a softer appearance for the sphere, let's set its shading to Smooth (Tool Shelf
sidebar) and add a Subdivision Surface modifier ( (Modifiers tab of the Properties
Editor ); make sure the Subdivisions Level for Render is 2 .
4. With the basic seings for the object in place, let's go to the Material tab of the
Properties Editor , add a new material, set its name to earth , and set it as follows:
F Diffuse color: 0.0 Red, 0.0 Green, 0.0 Blue ( Diffuse panel)
F Specular panel:
Color: 1.0 Red, 0.95 Green, 0.88 Blue
Specular Shader Model: Blinn (drop-down menu)
Intensity: 0.0
Hardness: 40
IOR: 10.0

This will give us a basic material to play with. Noice that the difuse color was set
to black (zero), which means that we are going to add the color from the diffuse
texture. The same logic will be applied to the specular intensity; we set it to 0 in
the material level to drive it by using a texture in the addiive blend mode.

Now let's go for the texture setup. Go to the Texture tab, add a new texture, change
its name to 'diff', its type to Image or Movie , and set it as follows:
F Mapping panel:
Projecion: Sphere
Offset: 1.5 X

5.

F Image panel:
Load the image EarthMap_2500x1250.jpg from the tex folder

F Influence panel:
Diffuse color: Enabled, 1.0
Blend mode: Add

We just perform the normal sphere mapping of the texture and add its color values
to the diffuse color channel. The offset in the mapping is used to get the preview
showing a part of the map that will allow us to easily check that the textures are
working correctly.