Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
You will need at least five image maps for this recipe: Earth-color, the color of the land
or sea in daylight; Earth-night, the color of the land or sea at night (usually provided with
superimposed city lights); Earth-bump, a gray-scale, high map of the continents; Earth-spec,
an outline with the continents in black and the water masses perfectly white; and Clouds, a
gray-scale map of the clouds as shown in the following screenshot:
The five image textures
Actually, Cycles can handle very big textures pretty well, even 16 K images (that is, images
made by 16.000 pixels for the longest side), so you can use them at the best resolution you
can find. Be aware that the bigger the resolution of the textures, the longer the rendering
times, especially if they are used as bump maps.
Now perform the following steps:
1.
Start Blender and switch to the Cycles Render engine.
2.
Delete the default Cube and add a UV Sphere (with the mouse arrow in the 3D view,
press
Shift
+
A
and navigate to Mesh | UV Sphere). In the Outliner, rename it as
Earth_Surface
.
