In this tutorial, we will go through the steps of creating a realistic globe and clouds using only shaders. We will add some atmosphere to the horizon with a Volume and a Standard Volume shader. We will also light the scene using a Physical Sky connected to a Skydome light. This scene would make an ideal backdrop for a fictional film about some unfortunate astronauts, for example. Many thanks to Will MacNeil at MPC for providing the scene used for this tutorial. You will need to download and use these high-resolution textures for use with this scene. Remember to convert the textures to .tx format before rendering.
The tutorial is broken up into the following stages:
- This scene contains an object called Earth and Cloud. We will apply the respective shaders to these two objects.
Hide the Cloud object for the time being. We will focus on the Earth shader first. 'Earth Color' map connected to Base Color of Earth Standard Surface shader Now we want to add a specular map to determine where the sea is reflective and where the land has no specularity. Land/sea shininess determined by 'Earth Mask' texture connected to specularity of Earth shader The Earth's surface is looking a little bit flat. We can add some elevation to the surface using the displacement map - 'Earth Elevation'.
Earth terrain is being displaced using 'Earth Elevation' texture (rollover image)Earth Shader
Diffuse
Specular
Displacement
The clouds shader is a little bit simpler to setup. We will use the clouds image and connect it to the Emission, Opacity, and Displacement of a Standard Surface shader. Displacement, Opacity, and Emission of clouds driven by Clouds texture mapClouds Shader
Finally, we will create some atmosphere, visible on the horizon, using a volume. Create a sphere. Scale it so that it covers the Earth object. Increase its Step Size to 0.1 in the Arnold attributes.Using a Volume for the Atmosphere
That concludes this tutorial on how to realistically shade a globe. Finally, why not try keyframing the rotation of the cloud and Earth to create a fake time-lapse effect or animate an astronaut plummeting to their death?