After more than 3 years of research and development, we are proud to release the Ultimate Cycles Earth! This model pushes the limits of Blender Cycles with several hand-crafted materials based on data and measurements from REAL SATELLITES to obtain the most physically accurate, realistic effect ever produced. The included .blend file is completely configured and ready for production, while also being constructed modularly to allow any number of modifications for your specific needs!

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Features:

5 Finely-Tuned Materials

• Realistic atmospheric density falloff and color based on data from the DSCOVR Satellite and it’s EPIC camera.
• Simulated physically accurate Rayleigh Scattering in atmosphere; optimized and supports camera placed in within atmosphere volume.
• Dynamic day/night Earth shader with customizable nighttime surface, cloud, and city light brightness.
• Extensively customizable procedural aurora shader for northern and southern hemispheres.
• Nighttime airglow shader based on measurements from the ISS.

ALL EFFECTS CAN BE EASILY TWEAKED AND/OR DISABLED AS THE PRODUCTION NECESSITATES!

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3 Dynamic Day/Night Effects

• Night-side emission, city lights, airglow, and auroras are all automatically applied based on the position of a tracked Sun.
• Tracked Sun can be independent of scene illumination, allowing further customizability.

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Includes high-resolution textures, but materials can support textures of ANY RESOLUTION

• Includes the following textures and resolutions:
• Earth Albedo (86k, 43k, 32k, 16k)
• Earth Bump Map (43k, 32k, 16k)
• Earth Clouds Map (43k, 32k, 16k)
• Earth Night Lights (30k, 16k)
• Earth Land/Water Mask (16k)

ALL TEXTURES CAN BE REPLACED WITH EXTERNAL HIGHER OR LOWER RESOLUTION VARIANTS (not included)

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Resolutions:

• 86k = 86400x43200
• 43k = 43200x21600
• 32k = 32768x16384
• 16k = 16384x8192

Texture images credit NASA, Visible Earth: https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/collection/1484/blue-marble