How to Make Earth in Blender (Cycles)

hello and welcome to another blender guru tutorial I'm Andrew price and in this video we're going to make the earth in blender so we're going to be making this sci-fi stylized futuristic image that you can see right here using 100% blunder you don't need any other software and free textures that you can get from NASA and yeah this image here so you can use it to make I don't know like business fliers the future of e-commerce you can imagine that text so they passed it over the top there anyway you can use it for whatever you want it is pretty long you know it's an hour-ish but we are making the world and there's a there's a lot covered in it and I think you'll you'll find it useful for other things lots of tips and tricks in it but since it is long here is a shortened overview of what you'll be learning so to start with we're going to be adding a sphere for the earth obviously applying a texture to it using a super quick method for applying textures to Speers that doesn't involve UV unwrapping we're going to be creating a realistic shader that reflects light only from the ocean not the land we're going to be adding clouds that actually cast shadows onto the earth which is always good a super quick way to make that blue sphere which sorry the blue atmosphere which which gives it that realistic sort of look adding night lights that only appear in the dark parts of the earth so those sort of city lights which is cool adding a space background stars and nebulas using some skies from Pro lighting skies that's not required by the way you can still follow the tutorial if you don't have that add-on but you know it's there if you want it we're also then going to be adding a Sun flare which is something a lot of you have been requesting on a tutorial specifically but if you just want to figure it out you can just watch that part right there yeah using and it uses a new node that I've just discovered which actually makes really cool looking results they're going to jump in and do some color grading to give it a bluish sci-fi tint giving an atmospheric glow to the rim of the earth to sort of fake that volumetric effect adding a vignette of course and then doing some last-minute touches to just give it that you know futuristic sort of feel and yeah there's a lot here guys but I'm hoping that you will learn a lot through it so if you are ready go ahead and open up a new scene in blender alright first thing we are going to do is delete the default cube and the default lamp and replace it with the earth what shape is the earth not a plane according to some celebrities it would be it's a sphere so we're going to make this sphere bigger you know you could just bring the camera in closer but some things in blunder get a little weird if it's not the right scale so I'm just going to scale this up by 10 and you can do that by hitting s and then typing in 10 on your keyboard oh and that reminds me I got to turn on the screen keys tool so you guys can actually see what I'm typing yeah there we go yeah yeah okay so we've added this sphere scale it up by 10 now we have to smooth it out a bit because it's a little bit too chunky on those edges there so if you hit control 2 like that it will add in a subsurf modifier at level 2 you can turn down the viewport subs just to one so yeah it's not slowing down your computer too much and then enable smooth shading so we're going to add some materials now in order to see any material we need to add in a light first of all so go ahead and add in a Sun lamp and just positioning it straight down like that is completely fine I might just change the strength of it to 5 just to make a little bit brighter oh and also set the background to be solid black because uh yeah it's space space bass bass bass bass bass bass you guys seen that dr. steve brule look up dr. steve brule space and then continue watching this too to her cracks me up alright so material time slide that over hit shift f3 to jump to the material node editor and add a new material so we're going to start with this diffuse shader here and we're going to add in the base earth round material and thankfully we do not have to create that out cells because NASA has done that for us NASA it's great actually that like NASA provides all their maps available you know for anybody to download in the world and it's like I don't know like I'm not a member of the United States and yet I'm making full use of you know the taxpayers of America's resources I don't know it's cool it's very nice I'll just say that so this is this is the one we're using so it's called the albedo which looks like that which is Alberto by the way if you don't know it just means the raw color of the material without any shading so that's what it is and drag that into the diffuse input and you will see nothing hasn't done anything and that's because it can't read it it's not mapped to the sphere correctly so what we're going to do is add in a texture coordinate node we're not going to use UV coordinates for this because it's a sphere we can get away we can get around it if we use generated plug that in there it kind of looks right but it's not so we need to set the the projection on the image texture to sphere and look at that BAM perfect perfect projection for a sphere great that's it all done you've made the earth so it's the raw you know got the raw color now obviously we've got to make it a look a little more fancy so the earth is shiny believe it or not because of the ocean so if you look at photos of the earth light that's hitting the you know anywhere on the ocean there's a big old glare coming off it so we're going to add that now by adding in a glossy shader I'm going to combine the two together with a mix sheeter drag those two in there and there we go shiny horrible shine this is like this would be appropriate if you were doing like a like a physical shiny globe like sitting on your desk it's not yet so it should only be effecting the water but it's now affecting everything so what we need if only if only there was a map that you know had the two separated the land and the sea I felt there it is ocean mosque so this is just a pure black and white image basically specifically for this thing I'm certain that NASA makes these things just so that 3d artists can make visualizations with it it's absolutely awesome so plug that into the vector input it's set to sphere but because this is a map like a black and white map which is going to be affecting something that's not going to be used for the color of the material need to set it to non color data do that for any map reflection map normal map anything right now I just set it to that for like pretty much everything I would over to the point where I'm like maybe that should be the default value no it shouldn't be but you get the point so plug that in there and look at that it's done the opposite of what we wanted the light the reflections is on the land so we need to invert it and now it's in the correct place but what is this there is a problem it looks still horrible okay um we can't see any of the ocean underneath it previously I would have you know added in you know little mixed node here and drag this down and go like Oh get it till it looks sort of nice you know like that but this is actually the wrong way to do it I've been doing it wrong for so long so many tutorials I learned from guilhom Henrik who's uh working for us actually did the artwork for this this very tutorial and I learned a better method one that uses free now which is much more physically accurate and how things should be so this is how we're going to do it so on this glassy part down here we're going to add our own little set up very very easy add in a mix add er here and then add in a free nail node so free now if you want to look it up you can but it's essentially the angle at which you are viewing a surface I started off well now what am I talking about yeah so the angle of the surface determines whether or not you see reflection or whether or not you see the original texture the original material so it's like if you're if you're standing over a lake you look in the distance it's reflective but if you look at your feet you can see through the water that's free now all right so drag this into the mix shader' at the top there and then here in this in this mix shader' we've got this empty input we're going to use this diffuse here so I drag that put that in there it's the wrong way around if we flip it BAM look at that so what this is done is you can see now the edges the edges of the earth has full reflection whereas before with that method that that I would have showed you earlier it was just like it was like an even reflection all over the entire surface right so by doing it like this we've now got something which is much more physically accurate to two real materials to how you know light actually bends around objects I look at that actually looks really cool so there you go neat little trick so we've got the diffuse feeding down here into this mix shader' which is being controlled with the free nail and the gloss then it's being fed up to another mix shader' and then this one is just simply to cut out which parts are the land and there we go all right let me check my little list here on the next steps because I do have a list next steps is bump bump bump bump I don't know what I'm talking about guys I cringe at my own words that are tumbling out of my mouth bump so the earth is not entirely flat going back to that there is uh there's there's raised land that you can see from space you know mountains and things like that so again oh if only there was a map that that had that sort of data available it's this one it's the bump map produced by NASA see I'm really I'm almost certain that this is produced just for 3d artists so they can render it it's crazy good so non-color data make sure it's set to non color data sphere yes then we're going to feed this through a bump node and this bump node basically converts image textures that are non normal Maps like black and white maps anything like that and then convert it into something that the shader can use so if I take this bump put that into the colossi input I think we don't need it in the glass because that's where the ocean is we want that to be flat we're going to only plug it into the diffuse and then I was actually looking at there we go so this is the before and then this is with bump tada now you can exaggerate that by the way if you want like you can actually push it beyond the one value you like you can go crazy high if you want and that we're doing a stylized earth okay this is not factually accurate in fact I'm certain that even this one value here is still higher than you know it should look like if you're looking at it from space I don't think it's that exaggerated maybe but you know you can push it beyond that if you want it's up to you alright that's it so we've got the bump we have got the reflections ah yeah so bump reflections yep the mask that's it nice nice looking earth now what we need is some clouds the earth at any given moment covered in clouds as I'm sure you are aware now it would be great if we could just put this cloud mask on top of everything we've got here the problem with that is that the the clouds will not be casting shadows onto the earth which is what you need to make a realistic looking result because you know as with how it is in real life the clouds are separate to the earth they're anywhere from I don't know the heights I was gonna I was gonna Bluff it and go kilometer 2 kilometers I don't know I got a friend who hang-glide who talks about it all the time and I just I turn oh but he's he uses feet like 3,000 feet or whatever I don't know what that is what is it with people in the air and using feet he uses meters for everything else and then yeah so anyways it has to be a separate object is what I'm trying to say so what we have to do is with our sphere here we have to duplicate it and then make another sphere so sorry duplicate it makes another sphere and then make that extra sphere just a little bit larger so I just want to keep it a little bit exact so I'm just going to manually type in so I'm going to hit S and then type in one point zero zero five and there we go so it's now slightly bigger than the one underneath it now is a good time by the way to actually name your objects because otherwise if you're looking at it you don't know which one you've actually got selected so the one underneath it it's just called sphere at the moment I'm going to name that if I can find it earth earth and clouds so now we know just by looking at the bottom left-hand corner which one we've actually got selected I'll do the same thing for the materials just so that I've got it earth yeah okay now for the clouds I'm going to delete that material give that a new material and we'll call that material clouds okay great I wish things away in blender to share certain named fields like so you could just name it like you should just be able to name your object and then also maybe make it apply to the material name as well I think that'd be cool anyway this is not a feature request video although I do like to do it so we're going to be adding in yeah we're going to keep this diffuse shader here but we're going to add in the cloud this guy cloud textures cloud map right here these textures by the way I forgot to mention it you can get them all from blending Google blender guru calm has all these textures so you can download them there yeah so go ahead click on clouds load that in and then just like what we did before we're going to set this to sphere non-color data I too I'll I'll tell you why we're going to use that in a second texture coordinate set this to generated like before plug this into the diffuse there and there we go so now it's completely overdone all the work we've got underneath can't see the earth at all and the reason for that is that it's just feeding straight into a diffuse shader so what we want to do is only see the white areas none of the black so we are going to make a transparent little mix in here so add in a mix sheeter combine the two together like that and then take the output of this color node drag that into the factor input and then set this to non color data and this looks very weird oh I think it's around the runway flip it there we go okay and there we go yay so if you look at it there should be some little air we go reflects re little shadows casting on the earth they're very subtle but it will make a difference to your your final render believe me I sound like an expert trust me I want to make a cool render you gotta get out of the shadows separately okay great so that's all that's all well and good by the way it these maps are blurry you can get higher res ones online if you want them but the higher res maps you use the what you call it the more memory you're going to be using in blender so just be aware of that you can go higher and higher but your graphics card will crash at some point when you try to render okay oh we can also do one more thing which is give bump to these clouds so if I add in that bump map that we used before this bottom node sorry yeah come on select them all and drag the color from the that same cloud map into the height input of the bot map and then drag the diffuse shader is the interminable like reading out like the normal of the bump shader of the dotted other node anyway you get the point so now we've got some subtle bump it's not even really subtle that's really harsh looking bump over these clouds you can this is what I've always been confused by the distance value but I think I've figured it out now like this is the perceived depth like it's like the fake depth of whatever bump mapping you're doing so if you want to make it look really bump map II you can drag that way up but we don't so yeah I'm just going to make it a little bit yeah you can actually go like higher than that and then pull this one down and it's almost yeah anyway you don't want it to look - because if you go too high it ends up looking like a really bad sharpen filter over the top of it I don't know if you can hear that my hair condition is just leaking all over the into a bucket anyway yeah so there we go a little bit of bump map and it's it's looking fine and dandy so we've got the earth underneath it we've got the clouds we are missing one more thing that's right we have to add in another sphere so with that cloud sphere selected I'm going to duplicate it I'm going to hit s I'm going to type in one point zero zero five again and then apply scale I see that I play scale for all the others make sure you always apply scale it's just a general rule of thumb it affects the bump map value displacement values just your your one sorry your scale should always read one right there okay and that's how you do it so this this extra spear that we've just created over the top of everything else is going to be the atmosphere so that's when you look at photos of the earth that fine blue tint that's most visible towards the edges of the earth it's because you know you're looking at the earth head-on and like the more you're looking at it on an angle the more atmosphere you'll like collectively seeing through because it's on an edge that makes sense sure it doesn't but so essentially that's what we're going to need to try and create so first of all rename your sphere because it's called clouds at the moment just name this atmo for atmosphere delete the material applied to it give it a new material call it at mo as well and that's just for your reference of course of course okay mm-hmm there we go so it's covering up all our great work underneath it but that shall change first thing we're going to do is that what we're going to keep this diffuse shader but to make this this sort of hazy sort of look we're going to use it with a transparent shader right here like that and actually just so that we can actually see this effect I'm going to make this a bright pink color and what we're going to do is use a layer weight node drag this in here and then select the sorry take the facing output and put that into the mix shader' and what this does I see I'll just invert that you can see it yeah so now what it's doing is it's wherever you're looking at the earth the middle part will always have no none of that atmosphere right but towards the edges it's more and more of that that glow effect so you could flip it around if you wanted the opposite like that but there you go so that that's exactly what we what we want we want it towards the edges we want it to be that that glow so now we need to do is set this diffuse value here to a nice blue like that Oh what happened there blue you can go really deep blue if you want you know somewhere in between that's fine for now we can change it with the final render if we want but this is cool but it's it's far too much far far far too much we're going to turn down the blend value and turning that down will decrease that atmospheric furyk atmospheric effect there so zero is all the way to zero obviously I'm going to set it to point two which is just just the right amount now you can alter these again it's stylized thankfully my goodness if you want to go down the rabbit hole of making a realistic earth my goodness good luck to you so there is I started out like that actually for this tutorial making a realistic earth and yeah that yeah looking at some of the stuff people are doing on blender artists like people trying to make physically accurate atmospheres like there's this whole thread which I'll link to on Blender guru you can have a look on like how to do a realistic atmosphere and volumetric clouds and it's crazy you have to get all into math and yeah it's not for me let me get a sip of my tea here um all right there we go yay so we've now got to the earth underneath we've got the we've got the earth we've got the clouds we now have the atmosphere the only thing left to do is to add some night lights so this is something that again you really only see when you're stylizing things but you know on the underside of the earth it would be cool if you could see the lights that people have turned on so that is what we're going to add right now so again this is optional which is why I'm doing it as an extra step here but it does it looks really cool for sci-fi renders so yeah if you're going for that look definitely add it but people say like from space you shouldn't be able to see both the Sun and the tiny tiny tiny little lights that people are turning on because the energy values are just so different you wouldn't see it but I like to add it because it looks cool so we're going to add in a hmm oh wait hang on a minute let me just let me slow it down here a little put a little second we'll get to that a second so we're going to add in a mixed shader and then we're going to add in an emission shader and this emission share is a mission because mitting light so this is going to be the night lights that people are actually turning on and I'll make this say pink so we can actually see it and then what I want to do is I want to make it only so at the moment it's just applying to the entire earth everywhere as you would expect what I wanted to do is only apply to the area that the light is not currently hitting so I am going to pursue what am I looking for vector I'm going to use this one here it says normal so this is a special map which honestly I use very very sparingly I can I've seen people on the blender Otto's using it for some crazy mathematical looking things but I know you can drag this thing and like control it so that's that's why I can use it so I'm also going to add in a normal no no no no no no texture nope nope nope nope no where is it what is it oh no what was that what did you do hang on let me think let me think it's very very hot in this room right now I am struggling oh my goodness am I gonna have to pause the recording ah yeah yeah and I did and I figured it out it's the texture coordinate' node the same one I've been using the rest of the time and what I'm looking for is that normal output and drag that into the normal input all right and then then oh what am i doing now oh yes take the output of that dot value and put that into the factor input and now what you should be able to do is drag this around and yeah it's it's almost like it was designed for this very purpose because it allows you to control which parts of the earth are in darkness and which parts are are in the the light day so essentially yeah we want light to be only coming from this area that's what I should have explained yeah because otherwise you've got lights just appearing all over the earth you only want them in the dark areas I don't know if I do actually say that so this is actually a good point to bring up in that you need to now figure out your lighting before you set up this you know whatever value that you want here so um in my case what I'm going to do let me just figure this out I just try and rotate to the side of the earth there I guess I should probably turn off that yeah that value there there it is that's what I'm looking for doo-doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo let's uh my national anthem for those who don't know and I'm sure most of you don't because why would you why would anybody care about Australia uh yeah that's what I'm gonna that's what I'm going to put a center frame I'm gonna put Australia right there you know you could put America if you want I was tempted actually for this tutorial to uh to make it on America I'm like you know what no this time it's Australia if you want to make it America you're welcome to okay once you've found the view you want it's Control Alt number pad zero as it says there that's going to snap the camera to that location there and I'm going to increase this the Sun value as well crank that up to ten and I'll pull it back a bit yeah there we go so we've got a nice view of the earth there and you know what I think that atmo atmosphere it's a little too heavy I'm not a not a terribly big fan of it let's set this set this to something like that yeah just looked a little actually let's try hiding it yeah okay there we go so it is that that is the sole cause of it yeah so something like that I see you know what I'm gonna go even lower just because it is what we're only we're looking so I'm doing it like if you were doing a view of like the whole earth like out here and the whole earth was lit up with the Sun you would use a proper value like 1.2 but because we're looking at just edge on like here yeah it I'm just turning it down because otherwise the whole thing is just going to be blue you know which is all you want so something like that there we go um okay so like I was doing before jumping around all over the place right now now that we've got this determined we can actually set up our yeah mm-hmm there we go which part of the earth you actually oh my goodness did it just disconnect it into there all right there we go which part of the earth is going to be be in darkness so now you're just got to match this up with your earth so just sliding it around it's pretty awkward to control and honestly I was really hoping that there was going to be a way that all there we go perfect that you could make this affect it automatically like I make it so that whatever the light is hitting have a separate material on things that are in darkness because that's what we did for the original Earth tutorial like years ago with but it was using blender internal so I went on Twitter and I asked people you know is there a way to do this turns out there's not not without doing some crazy Python coding there's a few workarounds compositor etc etc but this is honestly the easiest way if you're only using a still you can do this if not I'll put a link on on Blender guru so if you were doing an animation or something like that and you want it to have the earth spinning around maybe you wanted to use something different but for now this is the this is the best best way to do it okay so now we always you don't want to be a purple color like that let's go ahead now and add in the image texture the map again makes me very very suspicious it's this one here night lights modify it so this is just the one that comes from NASA but I got rid of all the blue and all that kind of stuff so it's just the pure night lights here set it to spear and non color data and then make sure you're using the output of the generated and then drag this into the strength of that emission node there we go and then it's that's that's that purple color right there I left you wondering where I live it is where do I live I know it's somewhere around here this is of Queensland Brisbane area that's where I am right now anyways now you can set this color to be a sort of an yellowy orange color that's the color of lights generally nowadays I'm sure it's probably more of a white color because we're moving away from incandescent bulbs but we want it to be brighter and the way you can do that is by adding in a math node drag it between the two of them like that set this to multiply and then this value here will essentially become your strength so if I want it to be super bright I can go 20 and it's like whoa well look at you zealand lit up yeah what's going on guys I didn't know you guys had lights guys but I know I know those guys don't like it but you know it's what you get actually that reminds me there's one other thing you need to do too if you don't do this you'll be kicking yourself later on because you look like a it's looks horrible you want to grab your cloud object there double tap R to rotate it around and just get it so that you've got a nice patch of cloud covering museum try and hide it as best you can all the Kiwis just rolling their eyes lay now ago you think you're so clever and ER as what you get guys come on now I gotta wait for one of you guys to make a tutorial cover Australia all right it's just how it is but no seriously you rotate the cloud like it doesn't have to match up with what it was at the start if you just double tap you can get a nice interesting looking cloud pattern is what I'm what I was trying to say anyway um so I don't know something like huh mm-hmm I don't know it was something interesting there before ah now you know what I'll just leave it like that I like the little patchy bits over there and the big old oh okay alright enough jokes let's move on now we can get into space space pace pace pace pace pace pace pace pace and we're going to be using Pro lighting skies this little add-on right here so poor lighting skies for those who don't know about it it's an add-on that we produced at blend the guru so we are biased but it does your outdoor lighting for you so I've used it I used it in the snow tutorial for example and it just allows you you know like once the thumbnails load you can quickly select you know sunsets and different things and it just accurately lights your scene like that so but this doesn't why would this work for space this is terrible right because just a couple of days ago we launched the space update but uh space in blender and it's a collection of cool little space nebulas and cool things like that and I don't know it's pretty I'm a big fan of it actually I wish I was more into sci-fi just so that I could play around with it because even like loading in like I'm you know the Suzanne had it's just fun like pretending you're in space because you like zooming around and stuff anyway I know sounds like a sales pitch probably is um so what I will do is I'm just going to drag it around because I'm looking at Australia which is Down Under I can't actually get any of this nebula in it because it's like off camera so I'm going to do something that you won't have to do if you're looking at the part of a the earth which has America on it right now but I'm going to have to tweak my my mapping for my my improve lighting skies here so ignore all this part this is just just so that I can I can fix this by the way if you want some if you get bored of listening to me which I'm sure you will you should just just just have the interstellar soundtrack rolling it's it's it's suitable for this is the subject you know and I love that soundtrack but honestly it is the only one which will which will just make me depressed every time I listen to the interstellar entre it is amazing but just makes me sad it's like this existential crisis on repeat it's yeah it's it's it's crazy I just sit there like be everything just feels like it's getting further and further away it's like Oh Murph don't leave me where oh let me he gets a lot of flack for that role that I was crying for month but man I that that really affected me that movie that was that was really great whatever we've got some space nebula um so there we go now now that we've done that we can finally finally get into the Sun half an hour into this thing the rest of it's pretty much going to be the compositor so still out here ident a UV sphere right here drag that out to there and wherever that camera is I'll throw that out there there we go and I'll come on where are you or is it okay so if you have this happen that means you the length like the maximum distance that the camera can actually see is too low so increase that end clipping value there we go now I can actually see it okay so now that I've got that I'm just going to make it a sort of a small ish size like that and the reason for that is I'm going to do like an anamorphic flare and like the smaller it is the better yeah something like that and let me just see that with the Sun lamp on it okay cool so you'll notice that this doesn't make any sense because the Sun is technically shining from that direction okay but look at where our Sun physically is in this thing right there almost it's almost of the 90 degrees that's like 70 50 I don't know whatever it doesn't match up but it doesn't matter because to the viewer that's it you'll just see this nice lens flare and you'll see the Sun sort of creeping over this side here and nobody will say that looks weird trust me it's just just how it is it looks it just works okay so um yeah alright now that we've got that with the Sun there select it's going to add a quick material to it we're going to set it to emission set it to actually don't even need it yeah hmm hmm - whatever that's it what we need to do because we're going to jump into the compositor in just a second we need to separate the different parts of our image that we are going to be applying effects to essentially and you really only know this once you jump into the composer and you get started and then you like reverse engineer like what do I need to do I need to do this and re-render it but because I'm doing the tutorial I'm just going to tell you off the bat what you need to do so go here to the render layer what is it called the in panel yeah it's well as I call it the render layer panel and what we're going to do is underneath passes we're going to enable environment as well as object index pass the environment is going to allow us to just see the backdrop there the Pro lighting skies there by the way if you don't have Pro lighting skies you you can get it off blender or you can just use a space image that you find online totally up to you yeah I should say that before if you don't have it you cannot continue at all you are stuck no so object index environment so that we can see yeah I like just use that by itself object index so that we can just play with the Sun so now that I've said that select your Sun and then in the yet this panel here whatever it's called I don't know what that panel is called we're going to under here relations where it's got passed index set that to any value other than 0 so I'm just going to set that to 1 that's what we need to do and then finally finally finally go to film and uncheck transparent and what that will do is if you look at it in the viewport you'll see that your background is now completely transparent and you're like oh where's that space background like it's gone but that's ok because in the render layer we enabled the environment part so you'll be able to play with that in the compositor so now we're going to do a render I'm going to set it to 200 samples and I'm going to set the bounces actually to 0 which I don't think I have ever done in any tutorial ever but that's because it's space we don't need any bounces the only object is Earth essentially and I don't think we need is there a bounce maybe there's a bounce coming off the earth into the cloud mmm and considered that hmm we'll give it one bounce but you know goes without saying that bounce lighting isn't really a big part of space ok and then finally because I'm rendering on GPU I'll just crank up the tile size to 256 good idea to save by the way tutorial 1 ok something crashes OH was a good idea oh and also I'll just set this to 80% just because 50 is a little too small to really see what's going on but 100 percents just a little too crazy anyway I'll pause it now while that is rendering and we're back so I render complete now we can jump over to the compositor and delve right in with some some fanciness I have to set this to render result otherwise any change you're doing the compositor won't actually affect your render it's odd that they change that but anyways we're in the compositor now we can go ahead and click on use nodes and then backdrop so that we can actually see what we're doing if we hit shift ctrl shift on any node you can actually see it in the background yay so first things first um I'll just show you right now very quickly the the end result here that we're sort of striving for so this is there's a lot going on here and I don't want to you know overwhelm you and go look at what we all we have to do but just to sort of explain the the image here there is this this glow this haze around the earth and that we don't want to affect the rest of the other we want to appear behind the earth so we want to make it look like there was a haze in space sort of then once that's finished we're then going to combine you know the earth on top of that and then do the Sun flare which is that main big Sun flare there and then we're going to do some color grading to give it that cool blue effect the what do you call this thing vignette yeah I remember that and then the lens distortion as well okay so a few things going on but first things first we're going to do that Sun glare so right no the the space haze so we can just have a glow behind the earth that's what I just said right okay so we need to add in an ID mask so that we can just locate just this Sun right there so I'm going to take the output of this index object render pass there drag that into the ID mask then set this to one now that you've done that look at that we now have just the Sun by itself okay so we can go ahead now and add in a blur node right here set this to say fast Gaussian relative so it doesn't change when you change the resolution and I'm gonna go with ten maybe fifteen okay and then and this is what again I'm learning things every day but all the other tutorials I've done I would have used like multiple blur effects on top of each other so that it's more exaggerated I now realize you can just do this color ramp drag this in here and now drag that white value over and now you can really punch out that effect so look at that that's cool yeah wish I'd known that five years ago yeah I used to get really crazy with like blah blah blah you know and then I'd set different values for each one and I could have just done this anyway so now we need to add this on just the environment okay so that's why we've got this environment pass here so I'm going to add in a mix node right here and take the environment put that into the top input and then the output of this node and put this into the bottom input and then set this here to add and now we've got that so that's the environment vironment pass right there so we're just looking at the stars nothing else and then we've got this glow and that's coming in there on top of that and now yeah now we can combine the earth on top of that with the alpha over node if we drag that in there and then take the output of the image the actual image now on top of that there we go so now we've got and we can just you know check that if we say crank up this add value to something crazy there you go so you can see the glow is not on top of the world so it's appearing behind the world and that's what that's how it should appear if this isn't working by the way you need to make sure that film you've actually got transparent done if you don't have that the compositor won't know where the the background is like where the earth begins and where the background is they'll just be combined into one so you have to have to do that but there we go so that's good I'll turn that down to something reasonable there we go now um oh yeah before I forget we have to use no groups here okay because if we don't do this no groups by the way I'm just I just hit ctrl G on that I wish the little screencast tool appeared here so you can see what I'm pressing in the compositor but it's just ctrl G to make anything a node group and that just keeps things tidy so that we don't get too crazy because it will get a little unseemly in here if we don't so I'm just going to call this space Hayes again I have to cook named it twice so that one it calls the no group and then one and labels at at the top there I really wish it just had the name anyway yeah we won't rent we weren't rent now let's get into the Sun flare so that's the haze behind the world some flare is on top of that so now we'll actually interrupt the the world there so this is where we get to have some fun with it so I'm gonna add in I've added it into this here ID mask I guess I could actually yeah I'll have to rename it but drag that there drag that there so I'm just selecting those three nodes make that a node group yeah now I'm not going to bother renaming that I'm just going to leave it because I don't want to have to torch you guys so I want again just the output of this now let's get into the Sun flare so there's a number of components that's going to make up this Sun flare effect the did you do there's going to be a streak effect I'm just reading my notes here so that's going to give like that you know the streaky effect out the sides of it and anamorphic flow which is like a horizontal flag on sideways a small blur just around the Sun itself just to make it look a little bit more empower and you know packed full packed full yeah just just around the actual Sun itself and then some sun rays as well like outside of it okay so first things first let's add in that glare node filter glare and take the output of the IDM I'll drag that into the bottom there and this is going to be our streak effect so start by setting the iterations to five just so it's a little bit more high-quality turn the threshold all the way to zero and now we can actually see that it is showing through there and now we're going to set the streak value all the way to 16 so the maximum number of streaks and then you can increase that fade amount which seems odd that you would increase a fade amount to reduce the amount of fade but either way there you go so it's now at nice and long and then we're going to increase the color mode upon just to give it a little bit of uh yeah like a lens flare sort of color there we go like that maybe it's a little too much we don't want it to look sort of like a you know a circus beaming out of the sand just a little a hint of color okay so that's the first effect done now we're going to add in that that anamorphic effect so this is a sideways horizontal sort of glowy effect you just look up anamorphic flare on Google I want because I don't have the rights to those images but you'll see what I mean or you can just watch this and you'll see in a second so we're starting with that we're just duplicating that streak effect but I'm setting it to two streaks so it's now just coming out horizontally and then I'm setting the fade value to something a lot higher just so that it really bleeds out the side there like a little more like that and then I'll turn the color mod part off because we just want to have a look at this and also set the mix value to 1 for both of those and what that is it's currently it's combining both the effect and the original object itself so if you set it to just one it's only going to be the effect so this Center here will no longer be as white-hot as it is didn't affect it okay in that case it didn't but this one it did so if we've got just this this line here now which is cool but to make it look a little better add a blur node straight after it air conditioners linking again and set this to fast Gaussian relative Y and I'll just go I don't know two percent for both of those maybe that's even a little too high let's go one but I just want to yeah just a slight you know little glow sideways but just just a little yeah not not as sharp as it was off the truck as they say okay so that's the anamorphic one if we combine both of these together we can do that with a mixed note drag these two here and then set this to add one two three go that oh okay so that's the flare so far looks alright ish now we want to add that tiny little like a small amount of glow just around here I don't even know if we need that yet you know I'm just gonna leave it okay we're gonna add one thing here which I've owned I discovered literally about an hour ago by accident like I was just scrolling through the list here and I saw something that said under filter Sun beam sounds like ooh sunbeams that's probably I don't know if that'll be useful for a Sun flare but I plugged it in and when you plug it in you won't see anything until you turn up the rail length and what I realized this is it's just the zoom effect they should call it the zoom filter which if you've used Photoshop you know exactly what it does you're this these two values here this is defining the center of the zoom now it doesn't look like much now that's what the that that's the Sun effect there through the Sun beam but if you line it up just right and it does take a little while to get it just right like this this effect would not work for an animation I must say but for still it works quite okay now I have to get the center of it that is pretty good I think it's a little too far look I think one in between there we go 45 42 okay that's pretty good now if we increase this ray length look at that so we've got this sort of a streak effect which is actually pretty cool so I'm going to drag this into the one we've just done that effect there don't delay don't oh look at this looking fancy so now combine this with the original alpha you know the original whatever you call it from the render layer thing I just lose names eventually and just start spouting up okay cool now wait a second here why is that not applying it over the actual thing so that's that this effect should now be cutting over the top of it but it's applying it still underneath the earth or is it oh hang on a second maybe it's not y'all just set this to 20 just so you can actually see what's going on please work okay okay good good good good good so it is actually working like it should I just I thought it looks like it was actually not applying on top of the earth it was going behind it it looked like but it is actually just slightly okay so that's that's cool we don't actually need that small glow I think yeah because the the Sun it was just going to be a small little punchy glow around there but you can see it's completely white there so it doesn't matter cool um and if you want to turn down that ray length you are more than welcome to yeah I don't know if there do anything okay all right cool so we've got to add a group for this cuz it's gonna get a little untidy otherwise so I will call this okay and see this you've made a node group with ctrl G by selecting everything ctrl G and then you've got these three inputs there and they're just going into one thing like that's untidy it just looks weird you can you can fix it and I wish blender actually fixed it automatically but it doesn't you can fix it by going here inside the node group oh I should be saying the key presses tab to go into and out of the node group that would have helped you a step ago but yeah if you go into the node group then click on this group input then hit N and Finelli you can bring up this input selection here then just delete all of these except for one then connect these up like that now it's one clean input it's small but it just keeps things a little bit a little bit more tidy alright now let's get into some color grading this is a fun pot so we're going to add yeah we're going to make it this just give it overall a nice bluish sort of tint to it okay so first things first we're going to drag in a color balance node right here turn off that tool power thing and then we're just going to drag both these middle values and so the mid-tones and the highlights to the blue sort of area sort of about midway now you can crank this way up like further than you know what looks okay because we're going to do something in a second which is going to sort of mellow it out a bit okay okay cool so there's a little bit too much color in here of the you know the great red Australian desert there it's a little too much College throwing out my composition so I'm going to drag in a hue saturation value note and then turn down the saturation so we just just look at that by itself we should see a much more gray there we go so you can turn it down even further if you want but uh yeah essentially I just want to get sort of a more grayish I believe it's called um bleach oh no is it bleach bleach out bleach effect yeah I just bleach in color grading right yeah and then the color balance node that's now applying this blue tint on top of it I think I want actually oh that's not going to work yeah sort of something in the sort of a deeper bluish hood yes something like that see how that looks one two three okay not bad it's a little too blue but this is where we're going to blend it in with the original so it doesn't look so crazy so I'm going to add in a mix node here and then I'm going to drag this is the original one here into the bottom right there and then whatever value you set this to this is going to be basically this is like in Photoshop when you have what do you call it yeah so you've got like an adjustment layer which is this blue thing and then you just turn down the opacity of it that's what this is doing so it's like giving you can do all your coloring effects here but then you just want to dial it back a bit because it's just getting a little it'll look a little too crazy if you go all the way so that's why I'm just blending it with the original right there okay cool so once you're happy generally happy with it now what we're going to do is add in an RGB curve right here and this is so that we can sort of exaggerate and get sort of a more of a you know like a cinematic sort of look so what I'm going to do is crush the blacks and increase the highlights and what this will do is it'll make this part of the earth like a little bit more black and this part here a little bit more blown out just like that okay so a little bit more cinematic it's subtle but it has the desired effect and then that's it for the grading when if you're happy with it make an O group out of it by hitting ctrl G like that hit tab to go back and we've got that same thing again so I'm just going to clean it up I'm a stickler for cleansing it Clint cleanliness so they've got one clean input and two outputs come on man killing me one output there we go okay so now we're going to do a couple of tiny little things which is going to have a nice it's going to have a big impact okay so the first one is we're going to have a glow around the earth and this is to fake something that all the people on blender artists forums we're talking about and that's that the blue atmosphere should really have a lot more going on than what we've got at the moment like what I've done here for this atmosphere what you have done if you're following along at home is really really simple like if you compare this to some of the known setups people are doing this is nothing people got math and all sorts of stuff but a lot of them are using a volumetric shader you know volume absorption scatter that kind of thing and I deliberately didn't want to use it because one it adds a lot to the rent of time makes things noisy and you have to use math to make it all work etc etc but the good thing about you know doing it their way is that if you looked at it at this angle here you would see a faint glow coming off the edge there because their their thing actually has a little bit of thickness to it so you're able to see through it so I actually tried it I tried using it and various different methods people man I just couldn't see that much of an effect for a still especially a stylized earth like this so that's why we're doing it this method so we're going to save that whole time here by doing this little cheat in the compositor and what I'm going to do is go to the render layer here go back to the default here and we're going to add another render layer here and I'm going to call this one mo and I'm going to take this sphere make sure you've got at mode selected bottom left-hand corner and move it to layer to make sure you then enable layer two and on layer 2 make sure you uncheck use environment just so that we're just purely looking at the the atmosphere by itself then go back to the compositor add in a render layer so I'll duplicate that same render layer that we've got there change this to add mo and then click that little button next to it and what this is going to do if I actually see it down here it should be rendering oh oh okay well that's why that's not working ah yeah that didn't I didn't do any changes here so you're playing along at home you're like what are you doing entered you have to select just that render layer by itself okay so the main render layer it's fine it's going to render everything by it you know as it is but this one we just want it to render layer two okay did that wrong let's try that again so when you click that little button it's now just going to render that roundelay instead of rendering the entire Earth as well so this should only take a little second here there we go looks like it's got a little pattern on I'm not sure why that is it's like it's picking up a reflection from the clouds I don't know it's weird anyway okay cool now that it's done that we should if we hit the control shift on that there we go so we've got just the atmosphere by itself now check this out yeah so in between here and here I'm going to add in a glow effect for the atmosphere we're just going to fake that little volumetric tint to it so this how we're going to do it add a blur node right here drag that into the blur input set this to fast Goergen relative Y let's go one for both of those and there we go got a little slight blur to it and then just going to drag this as we need to combine it with this but we need to combine it underneath it so I'm going to add a actually hang on second no no no got it wrong to do that we need to combine it with this so that it appears underneath the earth right okay so I'll add in a mix node color mix node and drag this just so it touches in there okay and I'm going to take the output of this put that into the bottom input there set this to add and if we've done this correctly there you go we should see that so we've got just this blue ish sort of blur underneath it and then this part here this is where it combines the earth on top of that and there you go so look at that edge let me just zoom in there with alt V well there you go so that that's that little edge that's the atmospheric little effect there that you would have got if you went through all the trouble of using a volumetric atmosphere which we honestly don't need trust me saving you some time and yeah render time as well which i think is saving the planet you know you don't have to leave your computer on to render overnight how appropriate and yeah I like to think I'm doing my part all right there we go so it's compositing okay that's that so it's getting there it's pretty close it's looking nice we're not done yet no siree got a couple of things we're gonna do ah one we're going to add a vignette of course we're going to add a vignette vignette by the way why are we adding a vignette so that we can bring the focus so like I'd standard image like everything is exposed like you know standard photo and your eyes don't know where to look so it needs a focal element if you want to tip on it check out my compositing a composition tutorial talks all about it very very helpful if you want to make cool-looking artworks but essentially the the vignette is sort of like a quick way of doing that like a kind like a cheat like to bring the focus towards the center of your image or whatever you want to be in focus so what we want is this nice like us like the edges to be darkened okay if you followed any of my tutorials at all and I do mean any at all I've probably used a vignette at some point or another so quickest way to make a vignette matte ellipse mask we didn't used to have this until like I don't know a year or two ago and it made making vignettes a lot easier so if we just have a look at this and this is going to define sort of the the area that's in view the black area is what's going to be out of like darkened so you want to make it you know mostly in focus like that drag it out to be however big you want it and then I want the focus not to be actually the center but where the Sun is hitting the edge of the earth so I'm just going to position it to be about there and then we obviously don't want to just combine this you know harsh cut out right there as you just show you what it looks like we're going to use this anyway so I'll just drag this into the mix node there input multiplied it should look terrible one two three go there we go alright so that that's the kind of effect that we're going for but we want it to be more blood obviously so I'm now just going to quickly drop in a blur node right here set this to fast Gaussian relative Y let's go 20% let's just see how this looks one two three go I think actually I don't know what I'm looking at anymore okay let's try 10% there we go that's cool all right so yeah what we've done is just added especially on this bottom right hand corner there we've just made it darkened darker don't want to go 100% otherwise it's completely black just dial it back a little so I'm just setting it to 60% and there you go so it's subtle but it will just bring the focus more towards the Sun then just make it look a lot more impactful and I don't it just really helps in so many cases so that's why I like to use it people give me flack for it but suck it okay so just adding a note group call this vignette can we just talk for a second about vignette having the weirdest spelling in terms of the way it sounds if I showed this to my wife who's Korean she'd go big Ned vignette and then she's gay and then she talked about why the English language sucks and I'd agree with that anyway Korean language by the way is got to be I think it's the most phonetic language in the world like the way it's written is exactly the way it sounds like I don't think they could have a spelling bee like Ritu in English because every single student would get it right if the way it sounds is exactly the way it's written it's fantastic for learning trust me anyways moving on okay so we're going to do a couple more things so we're going to add a little quick effect here which I I liked when I first started using blender and I stopped because everybody started doing at 9:00 realize it was sort of like the amateur thing to do but in this instance it actually kind of helps and it is what's it called lens distortion so this lens distortion node does two things one it can give you barrel distortion so if you set that distort value to anything it's going to slightly curved the edges of it sort of make this look like a bulb or sort of thing and this fakes the look of a real camera lens because believe it or not every photo you take like if you take a photo of a wall or a building you'll see a very very slight curve in it every single lens in the world has a slight curve so this just helps give it a little slight in a bit dualism to it because this is space I think it you know you make sense the lenses look a little bit odd right and if you don't like that edge there you can see in the bottom left-hand corner if you click fit it's now going to zoom it in so that you don't see that edge it's going to zoom it in and one two three there we go the other thing I can do is dispersion this is the thing that everybody started using also known as chromatic aberration became really popular sort of like five years ago but it does that so it's that sort of it's technically that red cyan edge which you get from very very cheap lenses especially if you're taking a photo of like a tree like right there where my cursor is it's pretty much what I'm talking about so if you take a photo of a tree you'll see that kind of like fringe edge to it which just yeah just looks a little little cheap so I don't know for a space camera I think maybe that makes sense so that's why I'm using it never use like never overdo it but very subtly if it's if it's used in moderation it can actually improve the look of things so I think that's maybe even too much dialogue back of it because those stars are just looking a little a little nutty there there we go so just just a very slight effect but it's going to it's going to do it the other thing we can do as well is if we can add a sharpen node and I'm not a big fan of this I wish there was a proper like controls that you have like in Photoshop for the unsharpened mask but if you set this to sharpen actually I'll put this before like in between those two let's drag that in there I'm sure there's a shortcut that could have done this for me the switch shortcut if you use both hands flip them around each other it does it sharpen so that's done what you can see in the background it's just sharpened everything I don't know the best way to describe sharp and other than to just say sharpen it's like the contrast like it finds the edges of the image and sort of emphasizes them a bit but if you use Photoshop you have proper controls on like the radius of what gets sharp and what doesn't get sharpened but this is just like a blanket sharpen so I generally never go higher than one but I might go I saw a point one I don't know point one two might look okay maybe alright then that final thing here we go this is the part yeah this is this is the cool part this what we're going to add in is a little like sci-fi zoom blur just on the world okay so if we add in right here a sunbeam that old Sunbeam I'm bringing it back and we drop it in here make sure we combine it with an ad actually let's just take a look at it just by itself increase this there you can see in the background that is like zoom effect on the earth I'm just going to use it just a small amount and I'm going to position this so it's like bang on with the Sun wherever the Sun is positioned I actually just got the right measurements of the Sun so this should be easy it's something like that it won't matter about the Sun there because it's actually going to be hidden right but just a little bit so especially on those night lights coming from Australia New Zealand it's just going to be a little little hit there okay and now so if I've combined that here whoa what yeah I think I started to add and then I just yeah put that into the add bottom input there and then drag this into the top input and then we're going to take that and put that in here which is where that was originally drag that in there and now take a look at it and we have a looker way over here you can see the effect there so especially like I said on those night lights you just got this like almost like it's like light speed into space right and that's it folks oh I see one more thing for the OL lens flare forgot to do this my power you can add in right here a ghost effect and what this is going to do is like fake the look of like the light the actual Sun itself reflecting inside the lens so if I set this to ghosts drop this in here that's what this effect is going to do turn down the iterations because you don't want that many of them flying around but a little bit can help a little column you don't want to go too colorful or it will look very weird very quickly but something like that and then I'll just drag this in with the rest of it I should name that why is that not named coulda swore I named it but maybe I didn't maybe that was the one that I had to like redo the group for which one's this the space Hayes Hayes how do you spell Hayes ah anyway that pretty much does it I think that is the earth Tintin so as you can see it is a stylized not realistic whatsoever but is the sort of image which would look cool on a pamphlet for going out of business you know corporate office that wants to show how futuristic they are and they could put like text here going like your future is our success I don't know you know but you can you can imagine the sort of uses for it so hoping you enjoyed that one guys if you make something cool with it please do post it in the comments on blender girl I like seeing what you make thank you all for watching see you in the next tutorial take care

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 546,979

Keywords: blender, tutorial, earth, cycles

Id: 9Q8PwcDzb8Y

Length: 71min 46sec (4306 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

YESS! Finally I literally waited for a good cycles earth tutorial the last few years :P

Just unfortunate that you still can't really get a good atmospheric glow