Textured Earth

thingiverse

This is a model of Earth made of a sphere with two displacement maps. A specular map displaces the land & ice masses above the oceans. A topography map adds texture to the land. This exaggerates the texture more than a topography map alone. It was inspired by http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:14070 and http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11660 Now available on Github: https://github.com/bld/Textured-Earth Instructions The Blender file contains the 1K specular and bump maps from: http://planetpixelemporium.com/earth.html Go to the Modifier stack of the icosphere. Adjust the subdivisions of the 1st modifier to change the resolution. Adjust the strength of the 2nd modifier (negative) to change the land & ice displacement above the oceans. Adjust the strength of the 3rd modifier to change the topographic displacement on land. Export the model as an STL. Enable the "Import-Export: STL format" addon in the user preferences if STL doesn't show up in the "Export" menu. To wrap your own displacement map on a sphere, it needs a UV map. Select the sphere. Go to mesh edit mode (Tab). Change the view to "Front" (numpad 1). Select Mesh -> UV Unwrap -> Sphere Projection. In the displacement modifier, set the "Texture Coordinate" to "UV". I didn't intend to print this model by itself. I used it in another project.