Blender Tutorial: Realistic Earth
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users cite it as the tutorial they are following when they ask about blur compositing, render settings, texture limits and cloud shading problems in their own Earth projects.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2022 to 2026.
What it is
Andrew Price of Blender Guru walks through building a photorealistic Earth entirely in Blender, using NASA textures and reference photos. The roughly 23 minute tutorial covers the planet surface, clouds, atmosphere and compositing in Cycles.
What people said
Cites Mark_72 · 2022-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Blender Guru's Realistic Earth - problem with adding blur”
I have been following this guide - [this video] - to create earth. Got to the section on add the blur to the composite (at 14:12 in the video), I only see it when I have the image is in the bottom of the Alpha Over and the blur in the bottom. But this results in the clouds and surface to get blurred. Can you advise on this? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
Cites tomh · 2022-10 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Project equirectangular image to a plane correctly”
I have a large equirectangular colour image of the earth. I was wondering if there's an easy or fairly correct way to project it so that a section of it correctly renders on a flat plane? Colour image: earth-color_21K.tif [LINK] (from this tutorial [this video] about spherical earth models) This isn't meant as a discussion about appropriate projection methods for maps. I'm asking what methods there are within Blender for re-projecting from a section of a sphere onto a flat plane. (I'd rather not use QGIS if I don't have to). Apologies if this has already been answered - I couldn't find it Many thanks
Cites mtx · 2022-10 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Blender reports error : Texture exceeds maximum allowed size”
i am using earth height map texture so the resolution of the texture directly impacts the details visible on the map, it is just a 'learning sketch' similar to BlenderGuru "Earth" [this video] . It "was working before" on my older machine, so it is kinda sad that i would need to downgrade Blender to get higher resolutions...
Cites BlueJay987 · 2022-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Blender hard freezes pc when rendering this file”
I've been following a realistic earth tutorial [this video] (to learn the software), and attempting to render the image instantly freezes my pc so hard the only option is to unplug it. It has also just been crashing randomly, not just this file, for absolutely no reason. I have attached the file here if you want to look for anything wrong. (hopefully, it uploads) [LINK]
Cites FranziskaG · 2023-01 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Slow render with RTX 3060”
I'm following the earth tutorial [this video] by Andrew Price. I'm rendering one single image that is now taking 33 min, and it's only at 9% rendering... He rendered one image in 14 seconds. My graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 which I also ticked in "Preferences" with CUDA. In the render settings, I chose GPU Compute (rendering with Cycles). I'm aware he's using a better GPU, but still, I figured RTX 3060 should be strong enough to render this scene. I have already tried with OptiX, but there's no difference. By changing the Feature Set from "Experimental" to "Supported" it does render a bit faster. Experimental is chosen in the tutorial to enable Adaptive Subdivision (which I thought shoul
Cites John Graham · 2023-05 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Where's the shadow light pass gone (cycles)?”
I'm following a tutorial (very beginner here) which wants me to enable the "shadows" light pass in the view layer - the tutorial is in blender version 3.2, which the docs say has this [LINK] , but I'm using 3.5, which doesn't [LINK] . Has this moved? Is there somewhere I should look for equivalent functionality, or has this just been removed? The usage of it is here [this video] from 13:40, if it makes any difference. Thanks in advance!
Cites rbaleksandar · 2026-01 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “No errors but final render appears to be incomplete”
I have a Blender file created with 4.0.2 (following a Blenderguru's tutorial [this video] with a slight modification in the nodes to make it compatible with 4.0.2), which I successfully rendered (as a single image, not an animation) [LINK] using a mobile RTX3080 and CUDA 13.0 and graphics driver 580.65.06. On a separate machine intended for ML and rendering I have 2 H100 at my disposal. The CUDA version is the same, while the graphics driver is a little bit newer - 580.105.08. On that system I can only do offscreen rendering. I call blender in the following way: blender -b blender_guru_earth.blend -x 1 -F PNG --log-file LOG -t 256 -E CYCLES -o out/frame_# -f 1 -- --cycles-device CUDA --cycles-pri
Cites RKH · 2026-02 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Clouds only appearing on the sunlit side of the earth, while city lights on the night side shine through without cloud cover”
I followed Blender Guru's realistic earth tutorial, and it turned out alright for the most part. But now that I finished following his process, I look at both his and my result and notice an issue: In rendered view there do not appear to be any clouds on the dark side of the earth. Or rather, maybe the night lights shine through the underside of the clouds? I'm not sure, but either way, the desired effect is that the clouds on the dark side of the earth should block out the artificial lights they cover. This is essential because I'm working on a shot where the camera pulls back from a cloud covering a city at night. It's odd because in Texture View, which I've left set to Eevee, the cloud te