I'm looking for a material that looks like the earth. I've seen a few, but they always have clouds on them. Does anyone have a material of the earth that I can put on a sphere which will actually look like the earth from space? Please help, thanks. ~JKS

I htink 3D Cafe has one, and if I remember correctly I saw one at Chemical Studios.

where's chemical studios? Thanks, I'm gonna check out 3dcafe now. ~JKS

I think there's a low res one on the 'content' CDROM. In conjunction with a suitable cloud material over the top of it, it works well for distance shots.

There's a couple of nice ones here: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kamelkev/Ssystem/#Maps and some other solar planets here: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kamelkev/Ssystem/#Maps

You can get a nice shaded relief map (3.5meg jpg) from this site: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globega2.shtml Choose the 3 arc-minute grid for better quality. You can bring the image into Photoshope & play around with the hues-sliders to make some nice color changes. Note that the oceans also show elevation as this is made from DEMs. mask-out the oceans & replace your own if you want but don't change the ratio of the proportions for the image(2 to 1), it maps great to a sphere. Use it, you payed for it with your taxes!

I checked at 3DCafe, under 3D models in free stuff, in the geography section,they have these that might work. earth2.zip earth4.zip earth5.zip earth6.zip And under free stuff texture maps. planet03.jpg (earth) The 3D models are quite useful, they work pretty good in Bryce. And I'm pretty sure I found a really nice earth object here at rederosity in Bryce free stuff object. It was called transearth, I might of found ut at Chemical Studios though. Chemical Studios can be found here. http://www.chemicalstudios.com/index1.html Good luck

Attached Link: http://www.chemicalstudios.com

Got one on Chemical Studios in the Bryce/Objects section with transmapped clouds already applied.

Thanks, I'll keep those for future reference. I ended up using the earth image #2 from http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kamelkev/Ssystem/#Maps. It worked well for me. Chemical Studios looks pretty nice, I'm surprised I never came across that site before. Thanks again. ~JKS

The second of the links in my post above was supposed to be: http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/ Tiredness caused the blunder. My apologies.

I have been to a site that has real time satellite images I'll hunt for it today and post the url here.

"But I being poor, have only my dreams. I place my dreams at your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams." --William Yeats