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TRICKS ON HOW TO MAP THE TEXTURES TO A SPHERE I'm not gonna go into how you can make a sphere, because you know that already. You need 3 sphere's though.One for the earth texture, one for the clouds and one for the atmosphere. The other two should be slightly bigger than the main. This might be different in other 3D packages than LW, but you get the idea. Simply spherically map the Atmospherically image to the inner sphere. Apply the specular map and the bump map to the same sphere. Use the cloudmap as a transparency map to the middle sphere witch has a color of maximum white. |
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Here you can see the effect a bump map might have on the rendering. It looks more real, and makes the day/night barrier more "fuzzy". Be sure not to bump to much though because the earth doesn't have that high mountains. |  |
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No earth rendering is complete without the natural highlight of the sun reflecting on the sea. The land does not reflect. The real reflection isn't that big, so don't overdo it. You can use the image on your right as a reference if you want. |  |
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This is another important trick that you might not think of. You can also bump the clouds. This will also make it more real compared to satellite images. |  |
Atmosphere
and final touchups
Go
to Earth tutorial part 4
