Blender Tutorial: Realistic Earth

Blender tutorial showing you the surprisingly easy method to create a photorealistic earth. Using 100% Blender and some textures from the good ole boys and gals at NASA.
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[@navdeepsingh9743]

You are the one who teach me blender 10 years ago, happy to see my favourite earth tutorial coming back. Glad you are still doing this.

[@Cin3DyUEFNdeveloper]

me to, but after ten year, now since uly in UE5, but without Andrew I nver would work in UE5, byebye blender helo perfect program UE5

[@shaheedgoni6594]

Bruh... He taught us all!

[@vxsniffer]

@@jealousgoose Blender classes, not English classes pls ;-)

[@gauravghodinde2949]

@@vxsniffer @VSAUCE4 or is it

[@graphguy]

I'm totally not in the 3d related business.... but I am a huge fan and admire the creativity, knowledge and willingness to share your gift with everyone. This was very cool :)

[@J.R.WilliamsFilmMaker]

For those of you working through this on version 3.5 or later, the shadow pass is gone. So to fix this, you have to instead use a Diffuse Direct pass instead. It's the first option under the "Light" category in the Passes tab. You will need to tweak the blur amount, but that will get you back on track. The more you zoom out from the Earth by the way, the more you'll have to crank up the blur amount. Hopefully that helps! :)

[@Bohr2um]

Thanks mate! This was the exact comment and support I was looking for! Big kudos!!

[@LegendaryLife]

Need to check it out, I gave up exactly after searching for hours about Shadow pass.

[@TellingSecrets]

I am on my 3rd day of blender, PLEASE could someone tell me where to find the Passes Tab and Diffuse Direct pass! Every time I feel like I make progress, I get lost with something lol

[@J.R.WilliamsFilmMaker]

@@TellingSecrets So in Blender, on the right side of the program is all of your tabs. The top one should be the one that looks like the back of a camera, that is your Render tab. The 3rd one on that list that looks like some photos is called the View Layer tab. The View Layer tab is going to be where all of your render passes options are, specifically if you scroll down in that tab to the "Light" category. (Something you dont have to worry about for this tutorial but you should know if you keep using blender is that if you render multiple layers to combine for a final image, each layer you will need to come in here to tell Blender what passes you want.) Don't stress out too much, even experienced Blender users agree that Blender's UI is not great at best and a radioactive confusing monster of a mess at worst. Keep sticking with it, and eventually it will become second nature in no time! Good luck! I believe in you! :)

[@paulmeesters]

tweak what blur amount ? where ?

[@saturnineNL]

I love this style of tutorial, step by step and no nonsense. Easy to follow with pause from YT after each step. Every tutorial should be like this, too many tutorials just yada yada and explain too much noise knowledge. If you can't understand a step, google is your best friend too. You sir earned a BIG like.

[@blenderguru]

Thanks mate. First attempt at heavily edited, less fluff, speedy approach to tutorials. Analytics show positive results so I’ll probably continue this style.

[@Numb_]

@@blenderguru even a baby can under from this perspective I would totally keep at it.

[@Allahuma.sali.ala.muhammad.]

@@blenderguru i like how you strive to achieve the most efficiency possible, inspiring.

[@23GOOOFY]

@@blenderguru I never minded your extra insights, rambles, and humour in your longer format tutorials, though!

[@Pandorarl]

@@blenderguru yah, i like this. cuz if we get a lot of side information its hard to follow through

[@zanuarkjordan7719]

14:50 for those on the latest version of blender, I tinkered around for a good 20-30 minutes and my best substitute for there being no Shadow pass anymore is to use Ambient occlusion. I ran ambient occlusion through the blur filter and the color ramp and increased the percents on the blur filter. Its not as good as the Shadow pass, but it was the best I could get.

[@pipidudukk7548]

Thanks

[@edgevfx]

thank you!

[@MrEIsBehindYou]

this needs to be pinned, thank you

[@simonjacksparrow]

Yes.. I've been pulling my hair out trying to work out, which part I missed. Thankyou for pointing this out

[@theoharisvarnas5315]

I ADORE YOU!!!!!

[@LFPAnimations]

You can just tell that this had a lot of editing to get right. No fluff, step by step, and clearly as concise as you could make it. I got to admit sometimes I like the slower paced tutorials because we get a bit more info on each step, but man was this one efficient. Excellent work Andrew!

[@LeastInsaneUtsu-PFan]

I honesty don’t even use Blender- I just like watching you turn blank grey shapes into crazy complicated artworks.

[@Jakeurb8ty82]

One of the main reasons I started learning blender was to make stuff like this. Super grateful for you putting this together with everything needed. The result looks spectacular and versatile.

[@harrytaylorgraphicshaul1393]

Just as I've finished designing, modelling and texturing a spaceship I find this beauty. Great work Andrew!

[@ericcarlsen4603]

Absolutely perfect timing. I need to make an earth and was literally just about to go through your much longer 2016 earth tutorial. Now I can use the latest and greatest methods in 25% of the time. You rock, Andrew!

[@brickmack]

Most of this is fairly straightforward "how to make a planet in Blender" stuff common to most tutorials, but that compositing trick for the falloff on the atmosphere is a huge help. I've gone through dozens of tries at a solution for that (other than just doing it by hand in post) but this works way better than the rest

[@gregmontroni1348]

Just one little doubt that I couldn't wrap my head around... Does the fallout work only if you have nothing behind the Earth and a Transparent background? Because I tried adding stars, both as a Material on a plane and on the world material and it just won't work... Dunno if you understand... Thanks!

[@MikeMorrisonPhD]

@@gregmontroni1348 - Same question! I assume many of us will want space behind planets, but wasn't sure how to accomplish this besides adding the background in after effects or something.

[@pudding1337]

Its awesome to see just how far tools like blender how gotten and just how much more accessible imagine 20 years ago you told someone that the average person without much experience would be able to do something like this on their home computer in less than half an hour

[@minigator2]

Truely amazing

[@zeeshanramay]

My i5 4th gen: Which takes more than 15 hours just to render a single 1080p image :/

[@AnkushKumar-qu6yd]

@@zeeshanramay brand?

[@Debaser36]

@@zeeshanramay rendering with graphics card is for several reasons way faster. use your graphics card. if you have one!

[@zeeshanramay]

@@Debaser36 The main problem was that I didn't have one, but now I just got GTX 1660ti. And it's way fast than my cpu :)

[@v-g-lant]

This man taught me everything I know ever since 2016 when I started my journey from pencil and paper to math and technology to create my artwork on another level I just want to say thank you again blender guru 👊🏾🧑🏾‍💻

[@Max_Mustermann]

Thanks a lot for the tutorial. Some additional things I found that could be useful: -In order to apply the NASA textures to a sphere without distortions at the poles, it is possible to use an environment texture node inside a shader. It's a hack I found online. -The brown tint in the area where the light meets the shadow can be reduced by adding a volume absorption node to the atmosphere material. -The atmospheric falloff at the edge can be simulated to a certain degree by using a fresnel node. This can be combined with the compositor approach from the tutorial for better effect.

[@aero_smd]

i have distortions at the poles, but im not sure how to fix it with the environment texture node, please help

[@Max_Mustermann]

@@aero_smd You have to replace the image texture nodes with environment texture nodes and connect their vector input to the object coordinates of a texture coordinate node. The texture will be flipped horizontally, which can be fixed by placing a mapping node with the x scale set to -1 in between. Hope this helps.

[@aero_smd]

@@Max_Mustermann I am still very confused, im not sure how to do what you said but i tried my best to do it and i didnt do it properly as its not fixed.

[@Max_Mustermann]

@@aero_smd Unfortunately KZbin doesn't allow to post direct links, but if you search for "Mapping texture to planet blender" online you will find a post that describes the procedure in detail.

[@hyperchunky7299]

I have a question and i cant seem to find an answer anywhere, after sometime following the tutorial everything went 100x slower and just viewing my earth takes extremly long to even render in, and when i render it says its gonna take 5 hours for a picture. ihave a 3060ti

[@Zi7ar21]

1:17 Tip: In the scene panel there is a units menu where you can change the scale so you can use real-world measurements and not have to deal with floating-point precision issues

[@Sam-yk9kh]

Did you do it Evee because I tried to do it on it and got stuck...the atmosphere wasn't showing

[@guigs4467]

@@Sam-yk9kh pretty sure he does mention using Cycles' experimental features. Eevee is likely to be problematic here.

[@artemisDev]

you can actually just use a cube and use the length of generated coordinate as density for the atmosphere with a little bit of map range to make it more perfect

[@jarozehnal2688]

I used spherical gradient texture with color ramp and map range. Same process.

[@TMVEC]

Can you either tell me how to do this or tell me what to search in order to know how to do this please. I'm stuck with a fully black atmo rn

[@hazeonflames2022]

For those of you who are struggling with rendering even though you have a good GPU. Go to Edit, Prefrences, go to the setting tab, and then select OptiX in the Top bar. Then make sure that you select your GPU. It's what worked for me.

[@AM-lm8ev]

Awesome work as always! Just a math tip when remapping the night-lights falloff. The dot product (when both of the vectors are normalized) will return values from -1 to 1 based on the difference between the vectors (1 for identical, 0 for perpendicular, -1 for opposite, etc), so for much easier control just plug the dot output into a map range with a From Min value of -1, a From Max of 1, a To Min of 1 and a To Max of 0. After that you can plug it into a ColorRamp and have complete and easy control of the falloff. Thanks for all your tutorials, I never would have got started in 3D without that original donut!

[@kerbybarrett]

Soooo much easier to control. Thank you!

[@matthewgartner5339]

Thanks for explaining how the vector dot products work. I remembered that from math class a long time ago and now it makes sense. I apologize to my math teacher for "When am I ever going to use this?"

[@bachabomba1856]

god!

[@StephenWebb1980]

The intro to this video is amazing. That last-second doughnut earth is absolutely brilliant.

[@ascotinva]

The river lake thingy is the Great Lakes and looks awesome in your tutorial. You are the best, Thank you:)

[@wauthethird]

Don't use UV spheres if you don't want warping at the poles. Subdiv smooth a cube, then Shift-Alt-S to invoke Mesh ‣ Transform ‣ To Sphere. Then, to get the images displaying correctly, enable the included Node Wrangler addon, select the image node, and press Ctrl-T to generate the texture coordinate nodes. Finally, switch the output from the Texture Coordinate node from UV to Generated, and change the projection method of the texture to 'Sphere'.

[@nikittan.4863]

i tried this, but the texture wasn't showing up accurately. i changed the projection method to "sphere" though and it worked out

[@wauthethird]

@Nikitta N. Ah, yeah -- that's something I neglected to mention, thanks I'll edit my comment

[@I_am_Spartacus]

I tried this 3 different ways and it still pinches in the poles.... the only way to stop the poles pinching is by getting rid of the single vertex and using grid fill...

[@nikittan.4863]

@@I_am_Spartacus are you starting out with a UV sphere or a cube? the above solution reqires tat you start out with a cube. the reason i prefer not to use grid fill is that it created a flat surface and i wasn't able to remodel the top of the sphere without it looking too oblong or asymmetrical

[@Ethan_Simon]

I'm extremely lucky I found this comment here! I noticed this issue and hoped it'd be in the video. You provided great instructions, so thanks!

[@smpritchard]

The oceans appear blue from space not (exlcusivly) because of sky reflection, that's a common misconception. Water actually does have an intrensic blue color, but it's only really visible in large volumes like, say, a swimming pool.

[@officialviio]

does that have something to do with chlorine?

[@TheMULTIcanal]

​@@officialviio ocean scatters blue and absorbs red part of the light spectrum... except of that its color can be influenced by algae, sediments or substances contained in it, thats why its pretty usual for ocean to appear green in some places

[@MonsterJuiced]

Pin this

[@isodoublet]

@@officialviio No, it's blue for the same reason that the sky is blue -- because high frequencies of light scatter more while low frequencies pass through intact.

[@rohita.v6493]

Yeah, that is called Raman Effect in physics, proposed by C V Raman (Nobel Laureate)

[@daveb.8426]

I remember one of my first blender tutorials, quite possibly by you, was making earth in like blender 2.49. So much of the work was setting up the shaders with the ancient diffuse/glossy/alpha materials. The 4k textures blew my mind and nearly crashed my old laptop, now here we are at 43k and PBR rendered on gpu. We're living in the future.

[@newax_productions2069]

literaly in 1 minute this guys blend looks 100x better than anything ive ever done lmfao.

[@StormBlessedxo]

he's a very experienced pro man and teaches professionally so his stuff should look amazing.

[@benjaminrobledo5466]

I'm glad that you made the sun at the very end, white in color. Not many people know that the sun itself is not yellow. 😂

[@guibson1258]

For those who didn't find the shadow option, you have to select Filter->Filter node and then set option from soften to shadow, link image output from your render layer node to filter image input, then link your filter image output to blur image input. After that you can follow the video. One last thing X and Y blur values can be different from tutorial.

[@blub9633]

This should be pinned

[@siemensohm]

@@blub9633 No, doesn't work in 3.6 ;)

[@Excalium]

@@siemensohm Have a solution for 3.6?

[@siemensohm]

@@Excalium I have a couple of different Blender versions on my system, so I just went back to an older one. Sorry.

[@JohnKMcCarthy]

I was able to achieve the same thing n Blender 3.6 by just using the alpha layer, which is already there, just blur and apply the colour ramp to that

[@wailboulmaarouf1920]

This is the best free software Ive seen. Respect.

[@CarlMoebis]

BTW, Thank you so much Andrew. You're responsible for getting me into Blender and learning the first important skills that got me hooked. The Blender community would not be the same without you. Rock on.

[@maikhowthomaz6322]

The guy is indeed the Master of Blender as they say. Thank you for the Tutorial. Truly amazing. I'm gonna make a short using this.

[@bamboopublishing8662]

Andrew, I still enjoy how you do these tutorials, other than that you make it look so DAMN easy! Other point of contention is what you said about the ocean being blue due to the reflection of the sky on it. It is only in extremely shallow water, rivers and some lakes, that the reflection is a major part. In the deeper water, it is more of an absorption and scattering issue. Water will absorb most of the light frequencies except for blue. The blue light is then reflected and scattered by stuff floating in the water, giving deep water a blue look. In the shallow parts of the ocean where there is a higher concentration of phytoplankton, the red and blue light is absorbed by the phytoplankton for photosynthesis, and the remaining green light is reflected, along with some scattered blue to give it the aqua color like off the coast of Acapulco. This is somewhat simplified. Keep up the great work!

[@abdomensix]

I found the pitch black of the dark side of Earth a little odd looking, so some kind of duller fill light representing the moon wouldn't be out of place. I also wonder how much of the Milky Way would act as ambient light as well. As always, these are such fantastic tutorials - without this channel I would have never made the jump from Maya to Blender!

[@Creativephillip]

hi sir

[@Creativephillip]

i have started learning blender. its been 3 months and have started making some vfx. and now i am making Thor's miojnir, problem is that how should i summone that in sky out of nowhere in between the video. means if i add that in video its there for whole time from beginning, i want that to appear at particular time in video

[@vexnity460]

plus lights from citie sand ubildings and whatnot

[@kitsuahri6585]

3090 rendering a planet in 1 min. 1650: I CAN'T HOLD IT MAAAAN. Pc proced to crash...

[@BobJones-cd9mt]

Just started using blender after 5 years. My old teacher died in 2020 so I was feeling a bit lost. Insane how far its all come. Think i found a new teaching source too.

[@DillandShaj]

Following along to this tutorial, my computer sounds like an airplane. I feel like I'm flying over the earth model I'm making xD

[@chaoyishih8324]

at least you see the earth, half of the time i am just seeing some blue green white noise orb on my screen

[@DillandShaj]

@@chaoyishih8324 haha the struggle eh

[@maxkappely]

Underrated comment

[@muhammadarifakbar1497]

Wht your computer specification

[@vikasgarg17]

Bro, your animations are always some of the most detailed and realistic I've seen from a blender artist.

[@st.kamnakis]

I rarely use blender nowadays but I always enjoy your tutorials, I usually watch them more than once actually :D

[@julzgaming4312]

I'm learning this realistic earth blender tutorial, and I'm just a newbie. I'm happy that I'm here to learn and give life to this model. Thank you for sharing this blender guru.

[@SchloobySnack]

I can't be the only one that paused and went back to witness the glory of donut earth right?

[@lildevilgamer]

I missed non color data so much from old tutorials. My life is empty without it. I think I will call my son non color data if I ever have one. Great tutorial as usual.

[@ruy_mascarua]

IF u run out of GPU memory go to the Render tab > Subdivision > Dicing render rate > set it to 8px

[@nayanraj2819]

Thanks Bro, you saved me 😇

[@gerrillero40]

thx

[@duxgaming9985]

This is what i was looking for in comments ! Thank you 😃

[@HammerdownProtocol]

You'll never know how much time and arseache you saved me, just now, Andrew. Its Pete Amachree from Artstation, btw. Thanks a million, mate.

[@jamesfilios6138]

15:40 Every American watching this was screaming Great Lakes!!! at their screen

[@TheFuzzypuddle]

adding the lights to the night areas is a very nice detail

[@virgilhawkins3390]

To help with rendering speed, in Render view hit Num0 to get into camera view, then Ctrl+B and select a box slightly larger than your camera window. That'll set it to just render the selected area instead of everything.

[@Darcy_stabler]

Should this help reduce vram usage? Because I keep running out

[@Sam-yk9kh]

Did you do it Evee because I tried to do it on it and got stuck...the atmosphere wasn't showing

[@dontbeconcerned]

Amazing how you just know how to do all this. I'm in awe of your memory alone!

[@esscee96]

I shouldn't have been caught off-guard by that donut earth in the intro, but I was xD

[@MrSudzio]

one of the best blender tutorials i have seen, and model great as well

[@Monkeymario.]

Tip: Change the texture interpolation for the topology from linear to smart for smoother normals.

[@spencer5028]

Andrew: Blender Guru extraordinaire, wrangler of nodes Also Andrew: doesn't know the Great Lakes (^^')

[@ObscureHedgehog]

He's Australian. Can you name one lake in Australia without Googling it? How about the capital? :P

[@WaterShowsProd]

@@ObscureHedgehog Hardly the same thing. The Great Lakes Region is the largest collection of liquid fresh water in the world. A better comparison would have been to geographically significant features like The Himalaya Mountain Chain, Ayers Rock, The Grand Canyon, The Nile, The Amazon, The Sahara, etc.

[@spencer5028]

@@ObscureHedgehog the largest fresh water body is kinda like knowing the tallest mountain in the world, largest ocean, largest continent etc.

[@spencer5028]

@@WaterShowsProd thinking alike

[@r.yuksel9774]

@@spencer5028 Well most people wouldn't know these things except the tallest mountain and maybe the biggest ocean

[@leonkennedy7776]

Great earth rendition. Especially clouds are awesome.

[@shivamroy04]

Magnificent masterclass

[@nidi_motivation]

bro out of nowhere put one of the greatest edit known to man kind

[@SardiPax]

Very nice, I'd like to see improvements to the Atmospherics element though so will investigate alternatives there. Good to see some new (to me at least) nodes in use.

[@eriktimme22]

Samuel Krug has a really good tut

[@Undy1]

@@eriktimme22 This. And Alex Heskett sells a really good planet shader (that's pretty similar to Samuel's atmospheric renderer but already premade and easy to use).

[@eriktimme22]

@@Undy1 Samuel sells the completed one on Patreon.

[@ShaggyMummy]

I remember following the older version of this tutorial for Blender 2.79, and now I'm back to reference the techniques again, Thanks Andrew!

[@fakermakerprops3948]

Incredible work, your tutorials have really helped me grow in blender!!! Thanks!

[@BuddhaFarts123]

Im not using blender or any 3d software, im just watching this for fun and you create it so easy to follow. I really like that ✌

[@freshcoastdrifttracks6074]

this was cool! It would be sick to see an advanced version with animated clouds, northern lights, a few satellites and the moon!

[@BananaJuice-ue6pi]

I don't even use blender, I just wanted to see how it was done. Nice

[@mr_vky]

Nice tutorial. Some stars in the deep space would have made the environment much better. This tutorial reminds me of Andrew Kramers orb plugin. Great work by both Andrew(s)

[@DavidsKanal]

Stars are basically invisible when exposing for the bright side of the earth

[@mr_vky]

@@DavidsKanal May be another system that makes stars visible from the darker side!!!

[@gordonbrinkmann]

Well, the tutorial is called "make a realistic Earth", so I guess a starry background wasn't the goal here ;) Apart from them realistically not being seen due to exposure, since Andrew renders on a transparent background it should be easy to add any starfield you like.

[@gordonbrinkmann]

@Eazy Dub Yes, now you're someone who says Voronoi texture... in most tutorials they always use a Noise texture which I don't really think is good for that...

[@ryleypalmer]

And animated clouds but that would be a whole project itself

[@acidmodz]

40 series is wild! Rendered in 8 seconds on my 4070ti!

[@blenderanimeichons604]

First there was two theories: Flat earth Spheric earth But now we all know the earth is a donut :D

[@holoflat1662]

Flat earth, globe sky, the matrix.

[@AramisLIVE]

Bro. I was mid-yawn while watching the intro and when the Earth turned into a donut, I bursted out laughing 😂 I'll never get that yawn back though...

[@sudd3660]

for anyone having problems with the textures, make a new sphere and double the geometry. that fixed it for me.

[@Exe3D]

or just add a smooth modifier. Happened to me too. Smooth modifier was faster.

[@JonathanNelson-nelsonj3]

Wow, I followed your original tutorial to get me started. It has been a few years since doing anything in Blender (life got busy) and I feel like I am starting out almost at the beginning again. A lot has changed.

[@nicholaspatton_1991]

This is quite amazing, Blender Guru. I am so curious if you'll do another tutorial on creating a node setup to create something like a realistic day-night cycle for Blender 3.2 someday in the future.

[@raymondwidmann2033]

Bro.. you are the greatest I swear I've seen hundreds of people trying to teach blender and they just fácil. But you!!! Your no longer a guru, you surpassed that level. Your new name should be BlenderHero! Or BlenderGod! Lol

[@DJphotoandtech]

14:00 Back in the early 2000s I used 3ds Max to make an Earth and there was a way to have a volume sphere that was basically invisible in the centre (when viewing perpendicular to the surface), but that created a soft edge for the atmosphere. The textures back then were only about 2-4K though, so these huge ones are awesome!

[@azure8247]

You can do that with a fresnel node

[@arkanthor_art]

Yeah I remember messing with NASA files on my old Pentium 2 computer. At one point I tried opening what was probably an 8k file in Photoshop. That poor, poor computer, and it's 8mb video card, may it RIP.

[@sulphurous2656]

I remember doing this with C4D once, no idea how to do it with Blender though.

[@lukeae2001]

Bruh I was looking for something like this just a month back, I'm hyped. Thank you heaps 🙌

[@lassekalhauge4801]

Awesome as always. Thank you so much❤

[@AtlasCho]

You are definetly into a GOD MODE in this Blender tutorial. WOW ~

[@mrnobody2929]

Plss don't make our earth 🌎 donut shape 😂

[@enegort2228]

Har harr 😒

[@CosplayZine]

🍩

[@Ikaruga_XD]

He actually did it hahahhahaha in the starting two mins there is a clip of it 🤣🤣

[@czeyKJKj]

@@enegort2228 has grey hair

[@itslenis3395]

@@enegort2228 🤓🤓🤓

[@deepthinker69]

Lol... the donut in the end cracks me up

[@ChristopheBozec]

I kept having Blender run out of GPU memory (I have a RTX3060 Laptop with 6 GB) even when using the lower resolution textures, so I turned off the Experimental settings (no adaptive subdivision) and now it works perfect, even with the higher resolution textures. Lowering the value of Max Subdivisions in the render settings when using adaptive subdivs seems to be also a solution.

[@StormBlessedxo]

Nice thank you very much! I suggest adding a couple trouble shoot methods for when things don't' go exactly as planned, I get it's problem solving but would help with more beginners. Thank you!

[@amultitaskingperson]

0:13 was so funny

[@BrushBash]

i see glimps of donut at the beginning, how happy i am, still find the legendary donut on this channel 😂

[@ThatGuyThatCommentedOn_A_Video]

15:38 That lake river thing is actually a collection of the biggest lakes in the world.

[@afkaqualls]

The Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Erie, Huron, and Ontario.

[@HelperUnknownGB]

No one could sum up this planet better than Carl Sagan. *ahem* "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there." -Carl Sagan, 1994

[@StaK_1980]

Incredible tutorial!! I'd suggest two things: 1- people turn on the light before dusk so a bit of bleed into the lighted part would be realistic (and turn off the lights after dawn) 2- The atmosphere looks a bit blocky there. You probably should increase the poly count on that. 🙂 PS: could you do a comparison between the quality of the full blown, max res images and poly counts and the low res one you did here? I'd love to see if the whole thing would be worth it or people should go with low / medium quality for most works out of studio?

[@ruhan8876]

For those of you working in version 3.5 or later, dont use diffuse direct, its rough, just use the alpha mask (as long as you turned transparency on) and connect it to "set alpha", here you can set the color of the atmosphere you want, and then just add the blur, and so on. :)

[@Utent-d3n]

Hi,I have a question,I am having trouble with the blur in the composition because it influences the stars background hiding it, is there a different way to add the atmosphere?

[@kronideus_portfolio]

view layer properties>light>other> there's no "shadow" checkbox. where is it?

[@LethalChicken77]

The correct way to make the atmosphere look good is by using the object coordinates to create a sphere with exponential falloff. Then just tune the values until the surface has the density you want and the atmosphere is as thick as you want.

[@amthx4005]

Do you mind explaining that in steps ?

[@tf2scoutpunch175]

@@amthx4005 This is a KZbin tutorial with comments filled with pretentious snobs who dont want to actually explain something for some reason.

[@imaginaryking5276]

I just realized how much my computer has a hard time dealing with blender when making this tutorial... but i will get through it

[@BUniqueBCreative]

Hello, for anyone that is having issues where your cloud is blurry, out of focus, the atmosphere looks weird. Go to your cloud layer and make sure the correct shader was added for Transparent and not Translucent. This will fix the blurred look.

[@jmuurart]

THANK YOU

[@camillbrissard2556]

BIG BOSS THANKS

[@mimo.46.]

this is just incredible, i dont know what to say, my jaw has dropped to the ground. This man is a blender guru for real lol

[@BJHSSkills]

Time it took for : For you- 20 mins, For me- 2 hrs

[@Attilakiralyart]

For me it took 5 hours

[@MiguelLegault]

Geo note : the area where you explain the glare is The Great Lakes. It’s the greatest surface body of fresh water on earth.

[@manthankapadia2126]

13:41 the shadow option is not available in the ewer version of blender that is 3.5 ... what should I do ???

[@theworm7156]

use Ambient occlusion and make the blur lower

[@SakshiMestry-m3y]

@@theworm7156 where i can find this setting? i have same problem

[@theworm7156]

@@SakshiMestry-m3y i think i was talking about in render settings but I'm not sure. its 4 months old so I got that solution from online, so I think just use google.

[@revolutionaryfilms5164]

My mentor, you taught me all I need to know about blender. i am happy you are doing it great.

[@talentedman5000]

15:45 thats Michigan and the great lakes! Where im from!

[@akadz]

I'm glad to see that Australian people know their geography

[@Frame4]

For the fuzzy atmosphere, you need a Gradient texture (radial) fac plugged into a colour ramp which has its colour plugged into the density of the Volume scatter. Dial in the colour ramp so the black is around position 0.565 - you'll also need a mapping node before the gradient (ctrl T) . After this, I mixed the above with a transparency node, just to ease back the atmosphere a little. Seemed to work well.

[@smoothprox]

Working for me. Thanks

[@06jonchn]

For those trying to find a substitute for shadow pass on 4.2 or 4.3, you can replace the blur node with the glare node, and connect it directly to viewer and composite.

[@JamieWoodsEmu]

Relatively new to Blender.... this looked like an amazing tutorial. Far more advanced than I should be getting into at this early stage, but hell... why not. Followed most of the parts... Each step, checking and trying to understand why you were using the settings you were, and enjoying it. Then you seemed to start rushing it around the 16 minute mark, adding cuts that seemed to skip bits. Which I just had to follow by pausing and re-creating the node elements... About a three hour process, checking your settings so I could understand them, writing notes on my progress. Loved it, despite the hitches. It was at the 19:20 mark (flicking to the wireframe mode), while trying to add lights that the program simply quit on me. No error, no log, nothing. Just... poof. gone. No big deal right? I'd saved the project initially, and been hitting CTRL+S saving the whole way through (Habits formed from a lifetime in Graphic Design) Guess what I found out? Yeah.... ctrl + s does nothing. >>Insert childish tantrum here

[@Popsz75]

Sorry to hear that's put you off - Ctrl + S should have been working, you can see it is the shortcut beside save in the file menu, works for me here, you should get a little toast popup in the middle bottom of screen confirming the save.. and yes it's real good practise i tell all my students the same over and over at our local coding club

[@JamieWoodsEmu]

​@@Popsz75 When this happened, I remember looking it up online to find, to my dismay, that it wasn't the default shortcut. Looking back at it now, I'm unable to confirm that! It seems that you're right, and that it SHOULD hav worked. Confirmation bias on my part while still angry? Possibly. Either way, I've since gotten heavily into 3D modelling for 3D Printing and found that the cad programs I use, while amazing for the things I use them for, are almost entirely useless for creating "organic" shapes.... so I'll likely be getting back into Blender for those in the near future. Wish me luck!

[@Popsz75]

@@JamieWoodsEmu absolutely get back in there & good luck!

[@westcoastbrent]

The total length from the deepest ocean to the highest peak is only about12 miles I think...( 65000 feet) sso that means your mountains are a littl;e tall, by about 100 times. The earth is smooth . I love your tutorial. thanks.

[@fun2wotml516]

I dont see the shadow pass on newer blender. Can you help me

[@vickmc]

Thank you so much for this amazing tutorial. It was so fun doing this on my free time and a learned so much new stuff I didn't know about blender. keep up the amazing blender work!

[@julianhahn01]

Is it just me or is the behaviour for the volume scatter in 4.1 different? When I do this step, no matter what setting I choose, the outer sphere is not transparent. Or let's rather say it's 'barely' transparent. Everything else works as expected to this point.

[@grahamking9705]

I found this also, so instead I just used a principled bsdf and plugged in the color to the alpha, tweaked the subsurface to use the desired levels and then added the displacement. Not required but I also changed the atmosphere density to a slightly higher level for a nicer image.

[@OcasoND]

the animations in daylight look amazing

[@robroy289]

I think there's a bit more light between the daylight and darkness. You're not accounting for timers on lights and a lot of people don't wait until it's really dark to turn on lights. Also a lot of US city/municipal/freeway/street lights are timed to come on at dusk - at least for public safety reasons.

[@personguy1004]

not really, the amount of distance between night and dusk, especially at this scale wouldn't really be noticeable

[@JustPlainRob]

That "River or lake thing" you were putting the glare on is the Great Lakes. It's some of the largest freshwater bodies of water in the world.

[@ian_wallace]

Great tutorial, it really helped me improve my blender rendering skills, making everything look a lot more realistic. Thanks! Just wondering, what was the music you used at 21:56 ?

[@michaelchileshe2619]

Aero by Ryan Taubert

[@ian_wallace]

@@michaelchileshe2619 thank you man