I’m trying to produce an animation with a realistic earth that has glass text move in front of it.
However, it appears that I can either use cycles render and have glass text OR use blender render and have a realistic Earth. I don’t appear to be able to have both, which seems really weird.
Is there a way around this and can anyone point me in the direction of any useful tutorials, or am I stuck with getting rid of the glass text idea if I want a realistic Earth?
Huh? Why can’t you render a realistic earth in Cycles? Or glass text in Blender Internal, for that matter?
Care to elaborate?
Yeah, a realistic Earth in cycles is fairly easy.
Cheers for the replies.
I’m new to blender, but the only tutorials I’ve found that have helped me have involved making glass with cycles or making an earth with blender.
I’m trying a tutorial to make the earth with cycles, but even when I follow it to the letter I’m not getting the same results. For instance, once I get to the point of laying the unwrapped sphere over the map and then select the 3D view to texture, where the video shows the map of the world over the sphere, I get nothing - even though I’ve done exactly what the guy in the tutorial has done, step for step. With blender internal it was just a simple matter of importing the map to the sphere and setting it, but in blender it seems to involve a pain-staking process that doesn’t even do what I’m told it should do, for reasons I cannot fathom.
It may be easy, but I’ve not found anyone able to help me through the process in an intuitive way.
If you know of any good tutorials out there, I’d be really happy.
Equally, I can’t find anything on making glass in blender internal. The only stuff I’ve found related to blender 2.4, and I can’t make it work for 2.6 - the whole set up seems different. Again, if there are any tutorials you know of, I’d be very happy to watch them.
I’ve spent hours trawling through the tutorials on YouTube and haven’t found anything that makes sense.
What I’m trying to do is set up a simple title sequence that involves a spinning Earth (that looks like the one in Andrew Price’s video) with glass text that rotates from behind to the front that then shatters.
When I followed Andrew Price’s video, I got stuck at the compositing, because I think I’m confused by whether it just composites for a single image, or if it composites for the whole animation. Coming out of compositing seemed to mess everything up - the Earth looked completely different.
Are there any tutorials out there that will help me get my head around what I need to do for this scene? And for future reference, what tutorials are good for making a realistic earth using cycles and glass using blender?
Sorry, I know I’m just a noob jumping in at the deep end, but learning the basics of a scene like this will really help my grasp this tool properly.
At the moment I’m just swearing at the computer screen because the program isn’t doing what all the tutorials tell me it should do, even when I follow everything they say.
I’ve had some great success already with blender, but this is just getting frustrating.
Glass materials in Blender Internal.
Hard to diagnose the Cycles texture issue without seeing the scene file. What tutorial did you follow exactly (link)?
Cycles is a rather young (and very much work in progress) render engine, so it is of utmost importance to know what version of Blender the tutorial was created in: Workflows that were valid for 2.5x may not work as intended in 2.6x and so on.
Upload a .blend of what you already have (e. g. to pasteall) and post the link here (Including textures!). Then we can tell you precisely where your try took a wrong turn.
In addition to that: Yes, maybe you bit off a little bit more than you can chew yet. This is a rather advanced project for someone new to Blender (and 3D in general?).
And stop searching for tutorials that cover the very specific task you strive to complete: You won’t find them anyway. Rather try to adapt the techniques from more generalistic tutorials - in fact any Cycles texturing tutorial should give you a head start here, as the basic workflow is always the same.
And also try using the forum search: Creating worlds (no pun intended) in Blender is a rather common undertaking and I remember quite a few questions regarding this with very detailed answers around here in the past months.
Cheers for the replies 
Patricia, do you have a tutorial for how you made that animation?
Ikari, the version I’m using is the latest non-beta download of Blender.
I’ve been following Andrew Price’s tutorial here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GLIbPKpgQ4), and Bill Knetchel’s one here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbCr0UyoFJA), among others (but these were the main ones). Andrew Price’s is in Blender internal, and Bill’s begins in internal and changes to cycles.
The project so far is here: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/28435 - still lots to be done on it.
There are about 4 different versions, but this is the one I’m currently working off. It’s a title sequence for a short debunk of a flat earth claim (in case the title confuses you ).
I was getting quite close with this one for creating the Earth, and got through Andrew Price’s bit about compositing it. All was going well, then I came out of compositor and back to default and everything looked completely messed up. My atmosphere had the cloud texture on it, and my cloud sphere was empty, and the Earth looked horrible when rendered, so I know there was something I’ve done wrong.
Also, on Andrew Price’s tutorial, when he goes in to compositor and clicks “use nodes”, his Earth appears in his render layer node straight away (about 27:37 in his tutorial) - but I could only get it to appear after telling the render layer node to render. Is this affecting it at all? I’m not sure how he did this and it’s not clear in the video - it just seems to magically work for him. Obviously I’m missing something important.
I’m looking for tutorials that cover things similar to what I’m trying to achieve, so I can get the hang of the workflow, but I think my YouTube search algorithm is working against me, as I just end up with lots of simulations and very few tutorials even close to appropriate.
I’m sure they are out there, but I’m kind of bored of trawling through 15 pages or more of search results to find something helpful - which is probably, as I say, more to do with my search algorithm than anything else. Sometimes I hate “intelligent” search engines… 
Hey, you can create glass in BI. Just follow these steps:
- Add a material to the text and call it “Glass”
- Turn the diffuse intensity to 0 (the level is right under the diffuse color), and also turn the specularity intensity to 0
- go to the transparency tab, and check the box to activate it.
- Turn the alpha to 0
- Then, press the button that says “Raytrace” on it.
- Finally, change the IOR level to something like 1.450, or just play w/it until you get something looking good.
So there you go. If you want it to be glowing, or if you want a texture on there, that’ll just take a little bit of tweaking.
Personally, I would do it in cycles, but if you like BI better, that’s fine. I do remember when I was starting out, I thought BI was better because I didn’t know that cycles had a mix shader node. 
Keep plugging away at Blender, and good luck.
Cheers Ben!
All the tutorials I could find dealt with creating glass in cycles only, and I wasn’t sure if there was just lots of messing about to try and get the same effect in blender internal.
I’ll give this a try.
I know I’m throwing myself in at the deep end, but playing around with a project like this is helping me get the hang of things with a bit of help from people like yourselves
Out of interest, when it comes to compositing, do I have to set the entire scene up before I do that or can it bit done during the set up? And how does all this affect the animation? Do I have to composite it frame by frame or will it composite the whole scene? I’m sure it’s the latter from everything I’ve come across, but I’m wondering if my assumption is wrong and that’s why I’m having difficulty.
Cheers again for all the help.
I usually set up the entire scene before compositing. You can composite an animation by opening a movie clip or a sequence of images.
It’s a great idea to throw yourself in the deep end, you’ll learn more that way. Just out of interest, have you started on the project yet?
Yeah, it’s in the pasteall link in an above post. A short title sequence for a video debunking a flat earth claim. Always fun.
Would you know what’s happening with the compositing conundrum I posted above?
In Andrew Price’s video on creating a realistic earth using blender internal, when he goes in to compositor and clicks “use nodes”, his Earth appears in his render layer node straight away (about 27:37 in to his tutorial) - but I could only get it to appear after telling the render layer node to render the scene. Is this affecting it at all? I’m not sure how he did this and it’s not clear in the video - it just seems to magically work for him. Obviously I’m missing something important. I’m also not sure if this has something to do with the problems I had (see above post - the spheres swapping textures).
You have to click “Backdrop” and then use a viewer node.
Done that, but it still won’t display like on Adrew Price’s tutorial until I hit render…
Well, you have to render to see the result…
The backdrop simply displays the composited result of your render.
Did anybody mention that you had several thousand double vertices in the text object? That would never render glass…
When upload, while save check Compress on Toolshelf (use Save As when miss). It’s 4Mb instead of 11 - makes life easier on both ends.
Textures were not included, so Earth is not realistic anymore…
Glass in BI as is Earth. http://www.pasteall.org/blend/28456