I was always blown away with the realistic looking planets people got with there 3d software and wondered how I could do it with strata. I found a tutorial using Lightwave on how to make a realistic planet earth and I adapted it to strata. It was a quick adaptation so you can get better results if you tweak this one a bit.

Okay first of you will need to download the three maps that I have made. The first one is the image map of the earth itself. The second one is the bump map of the earth. The third on is the cloud map of all the clouds swirling around the earth.

EarthMaps.sit

Okay let's make our first shader. Load the earth image map by clicking on the "Map" button.

Then click on the "load" button inside the image map dialogue window. Click "okay", now your image is loaded.

Now we need to get the bump map loaded. Locate the bump map channel in the texture shader dialogue and click on the folder icon.

Now click on the "load" button to browse and load the bump map you downloaded for this tutorial. Click "Okay" and now you have the bump map loaded.

That's it for the actual planet part of earth.

Now for the clouds of earth. Start a new surface texture and name it clouds. Now in the image Map box click on the "Map" button to load the cloud map.

Once you have your water shader made then you will need to apply it to a simple geometry for you water surface. I have built a rough bird bath with rocks in it and then the water plane above the rocks. I have applied the water texture to the water plane twice.

Okay now load the black and white map of the clouds into the image map, Bump, and Stencil channels. Make the settings the way I have them and then mess around with them to get different results. Also notice I chose a specular color to give the clouds a little color.

Now let's drop in two spheres that are close in size.

Now lets make one just a little bigger than the other. Open your "Project Window" if it isn't already open and locate the sphere objects in the list. Like below. now turn down the arrows for each and then locate the "scale" arrow and turn them down too. Now use the numbers to size one smaller, this will be the earth, and the other one will be a bit bigger, that will be the clouds. See the example below.

Okay now let's apply the maps to each sphere that you have placed and sized. Notice I put an aura on each sphere and the mapping is a different shape on the clouds than it is on the earth.

Once you have the maps applied to the spheres you need to align them. This will put the little sphere (earth) inside of the big sphere (clouds).

Now set up the lights and cameras. I also used the clearNightSky background that is standard with Studio Pro.

Here is the final render. Hope you like this one. The trick is in the cloud texture. Good luck.