How to Make a Realistic Earth in Blender in 20 mins 

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! :)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

being busy with other things, I was not following up on this channel for about an year... but now I get to see clearly the tremendous improvements in these tutorials. Well done, Andrew! Also, quite a lot of nice new features in blender. I think I will try it on, but using flat earth shape (LOL)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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 👊🏾🧑🏾‍💻

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

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

your videos are always fun. you teached me how to make a donut years ago and since then ive learned so much more about blender. always nice to get back to your videos.

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.

this is what started my adventure 2 weeks ago! the mission to make a pixel art earth animation in 60 FPS and a realistic earth animation! this is amazing

Awesome as always. Thank you so much❤

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!

Very nice tutorial, it is actually my second blender tutorial I was working with. I had to reduce the speed to play the video with 0.5, because otherwise I was too fast to actually try to understand and repeat the numerous steps. Would have loved to have some advice to create the fly over shown inbetween, but this is probably content of my next tutorial 😀

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'.

Plss don't make our earth 🌎 donut shape 😂

Goodness, so many awesome mini-lessons in this one! Thanks heaps, had you not explained these to me - I’d be fumbling on so many of these concepts for years

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!

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.

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!

I tried doing this a year or two ago and I was never able to figure out why my ocean looked so garbage. I was anticipating being able to find out what I could have done differently/what I did wrong, and you delivered.

Thankyou so much for this Andrew, and for all your amazing tutorials over the years…you have been a true inspiration to me..I wouldn’t have started this journey if it were not for your beginners tutorials…just one thing…I made sure, as a fellow Aussie, to place Perth city at the centre of my globe!!…keep on doing what you do, great work!!

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!

Holy cow! I have been looking for these extremely hi-res maps just recently. Woohoo! Thank you! Your results look killer! Good on you!

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.

Great job, sir guru. Pushing the dimensions up to huge really does the trick to make the flyovers realistic. Thanks for the lesson!

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.

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.

I wish I were joking when I said I really needed this, but this actually helped me. Thank you for updating your tutorial! Keep up the great work.

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

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)

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

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

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.

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

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.

wowoowow perfect timing! needed some specific Earth angles and tough to find exact matches in stock footage.

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

That “little lake river thing” happens to be the Great Lakes, the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth (at least by total area) and are so large that they have sea-like characteristics like tides. They were carved out by glaciers. 4 of them surround and define the borders of the state of Michigan where I have lived my whole life. Us Michiganders are very proud of our Great Lakes, even if they do make the weather here a bit… unpredictable. Thanks for the great tutorial! I’m working on model of the Enterprise that I think would look great orbiting the Earth in a render or two.

This is the best free software Ive seen. Respect.

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

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

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?

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

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.

Magnificent masterclass

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

Excellent tutorial Andrew. The efficiency, knowledge and usefulness reminds me of the turorials of another Andrew (hint-Video Copilot). Rock On.

Great earth rendition. Especially clouds are awesome.

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

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

Cheapest / best way I found to make edge soft was a transparent/diffuse shader mixed using a fresnel or layer weight node + colour ramp to tweak. Another colour ramp to dial in atmos colour. It was something like that, was awhile ago now. Comp works great but I'm still a sucker for in viewport solutions

I have been struggling to create a planet in blender for an entire day now by myself (because I'm stubborn) and to no avail as I cannot properly eliminate the seam in my equirectangular projection and when I saw you'd made a tutorial I almost cried. Thank you so so much

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!

This is a tutorial where I would love to see a much slower and more detailled version.

Top notch, my man. I like that experimental Adaptive Subdivision feature. I also have the Polygon add-on available now in my properties panel. Top Notch, top notch, like the judge Smells would say. Great Earth results, fine lesson.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Hi Andrew, i am new to this blender and animation thing, i m glad i stumbled on you, i made my first donut all thanks to you, you are a great teacher.

Thank you so much! This is stunning work and great teaching. Even as a beginner I could follow the instructions easily! Liked and subscribed. :)

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

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.

always worth the wait, best tutorial on blender

Fantastic tutorial, keep up the great videos!

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.

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 ?

Great explanation, especially the compositor was always a bit of a mystery to me, now its more clear, thank you.

I've never so much as touched a program like this, and I doubt I ever will, but it's really cool to see.

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

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

Amazing work! Thank you very much for sharing your experiences!

I actually made a node to vary to color of the atmosphere from light blue to black and utilized a color ramp and a bunch of math nodes to concentrate it to a specific portion, though I think I added a volume absorb node as well (opposite color to the scatter node) It seemed to work pretty well. I also made the ocean black, but I was going for more of a himawari look. I think the grey color actually works pretty well. I also made everything to scale. Luckily we can change the units within blender itself to an astronomical scale, quite literally. That helps to make things to scale more easily :D I never actually thought about using the SSS node for the clouds, it looks really good I also noticed that from a lot of satellite photos, the ocean tends to have a bit of a roughness to it, so using a bit of a noise or musgrave texture can help to add a bit to that :) oh! An interesting effect I tried was making the sun really bright and lowering exposure, then, when adding the lights, I change that exposure by increasing it show parts lit by city lights

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

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.

Thank you. Undoubtedly the simplest tutorial and with everything you need in one "click"

Love your tutorials!!

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

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

Great work, thanks! And I am proud to understand several minutes of what you did :-D

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.

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