A couple of weeks ago, I was tasked with choosing a tutorial on Video Copilot (.net) to follow through in Adobe After Effects. Timidly, I chose this simple video - a guide to creating a spinning Earth in outer space.
What I had when I was finished was a little bit different from what the video shows. Sadly, this site is keeping me from uploading the 10-second file. (Maybe I set the quality too high?) All I have to upload are a bunch of screenshots I was told to take while I worked.
I took this one early on, when I had just taken a flat map of the Earth and bent it into a sphere. The tutorial pointed me to the "CC Sphere" effect (look to the right, under the "Effects and Presets" area). It pretty much takes any picture and rounds it into a 3-dimensional sphere for you. I was scared that "making the Earth" would be a longer, more challenging process, but all I really had to do was click a button. To say I was pretty grateful is an understatement.
Here, I was getting started shedding light on the planet. The tutorial wanted me to make a bright green glow on its right outline. I was confused about it at first, but it helped with creating a realistic blue atmosphere over the sphere a while later.
Observe. I can mostly thank the tutorial that it came out this well, but I'm kind of proud of it.
The video called for a scrolling "space fog" texture underneath the Earth. It ended up purple in the finished version, but this is what the texture looked like on its own. The classic "Fractal Noise" effect worked just right after a few edits.
It's not a realistic Earth unless it has clouds, right? This picture looks really weird, I know. It actually looked like a bunch of clouds after I lay it on top of the Earth's texture (which took forever for some reason). I set a few keyframes so it would spin just a little faster than the continents below it.
This is the closest you might get to seeing the finished animation. I took this shot before waiting about 10 minutes for it to render. When I saw the result, I was honestly stunned that I had made anything so good-looking.
