Mars Textured and Rotating in Space

Description:

This is Mars because I am going to need Mars in an animation project. I read the appropriate entries in the Blender manual, watched some video tutorials and made it. It is in simple terms a sphere with a material and a UV image texture. Following the instructions regarding UV unwrapping and such I had a single image to work upon. Opening it in GIMP I could easily transform the image graphically and export it to the same image being used by Blender as the UV texture. Hit the image refresh button then render the frame to see what needed to be adjusted in the UV texture image in GIMP. This was not a trivial or short process. The images I used were high res pictures from NASA and the JPL. This means they are legally in the Public Domain. The two main images were taken of opposite sides but they did not line up. This is where the artistic approach came in to play. Hiding the seam was a bit of trick the eye painting and brushwork. To properly display this 3D asset the planet really needs to spin. I used keyframe animation. Every 10 seconds a 180 degree keyframe, 20 seconds per rotation. I keyframed out three rotations. I did three so it was easy to see the flow when scrubbing on the timeline. If anyone would like to see the rendered video can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLdsebj26Y&feature=youtu.be

Ryan.