Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating a realistic planet Earth as seen
from space
In this recipe, we will create a realistic planet Earth using image textures available on
the Web:
Getting ready
The image textures provided with this topic have generally been heavily down-scaled
and are good only for demonstration purposes (or, in this case, for a very distant Earth
render). For better results with this recipe, just replace these low resolution images
with hi-res versions that you can download, for example, from these addresses:
Before you download anything, always have a look at the license of the images
provided by any site you can find, to be sure they are released as freely usable, espe-
cially if you are going to use them for commercial works. The preceding links should
be good enough, but on the Internet things can change quite quickly, so double-check!
The image maps you need are, at least, five:
•
Earth-color
: The color of the land/sea surfaces in daylight
•
Earth-night
: The color of the land/sea surfaces at night (usually provided
with superimposed city lights)
•
Earth-bump
: A gray-scale high map of the continents
•
Earth-spec
: A black and white outline with the continents filled with black
and the water masses perfectly white
