The Earth

I’ve been working on this the last three days for a contest on DeviantArt. It’s a recreation of one of my first projects using Blender. sta.sh/01ovn5ycpt68
The hardest part of this project was probably the night lights. There’s currently no way to correctly input light information into material nodes in Cycles. Since node networks are fully generated before Lighting in the render process. Instead I had to use Dot Product to match the material transition to the light direction.
Created fully in Blender and Photoshop. Earth textures from Nasa.



I agree the lights are problem to add in cycles.

Very realistic result, I noticed that your 2013 version was already very good.

Yeah, There might be a way to set it up with drivers or something so that it moves when the sun moves. But I’m not sure.

Thanks! The 2013 one was based of the old BlenderGuru tutorial for BI.