In order to capture the pure joy at being the first living thing in space, my next film, Laika, calls for a beautiful, highly detailed Earth model. I realized that this is not the first time I have tried to create an Earth to fit a scene, so I decided to dust off my old models and compare them to my new model.
For the Ancestor’s Tale, I included a shot of an asteroid hitting the Earth 65 million years ago. For this model, I used a single sub-surfaced sphere mapped with a NASA Blue Marble image. The texture map was edited in The GIMP to distort the shapes and positions of the continents to account for continental drift. I duplicated the sphere and changed the material to a Blender halo effect to create the blue atmosphere.
Earth 1.0 in The Ancestor's Tale
Earth 1.0 has many problems, but the unrealistic lightening is perhaps the most glaring. I used multiple light sources in different locations to ensure that the sphere was illuminated almost uniformly, forgetting that there is essentially one light source in the solar system.
About a year later, in Primitive Welcome, I made a similar scene featuring the entire Earth against a field of stars. I used a high-resolution satellite photo, which included clouds, and mapped it around a more-heavily sub-surfaced sphere. The atmosphere was a simply a separate, slightly larger sphere with a transparent blue hue.
Earth 2.0 in Primitive Welcome
Earth 2.0 looks much more realistic because of the single light source and shaders which create the nice falloff effect on the dark side of the planet. The stars are too bright and too consistant for realism.
For the latest model, I followed this fantastic Earth tutorial by William Chamberlin to the following result.
Earth 3.0 in Laika
The tutorial led me through the process of using multiple spheres, each with different materials and textures, and compositing them all together using the node editor. The clouds, for example, are mapped onto a sphere which is only very slightly larger than the surface sphere.
Earth 3.0 will only be viewed from the point of view of the Sputnik 2 satellite, so the full Earth will never been in a frame. Instead, the audience will see the Earth from an angle like the one below.
Earth 3.0 (closeup) in Laika.
I am satisfied with the result and encouraged by the steady increase in image quality through the years. The end result of a frame of animation will always be a mixture of realism, technical limitations, and stylization. I have yet to develop the look and feel of this film, but conveying the beauty and distance of the Earth is essential to the plot.