This planet was by far the hardest for me to render properly. I've put together two different models of Earth; one is designed to be photo-realistic, and the other is designed after NASA's Blue Marble. Both models include optional night and city lights sections. These Earth models have been used in various productions by hobbyists and film groups. I've written a tutorial demonstrating how to build the models - you may find it here.
New in blender is a physically based volume material type, intended for rendering participating media, such as smoke, clouds, fog, and other volumetric effects. All procedural textures are supported as data sources, as well as two new textures for rendering voxels (such as our the smoke simulator) and point clouds.
Durian is an Asian fruit, ugly and smelly but delicious. That’s a perfect code name for a movie project aimed at adolescents mostly; with an epic fantasy theme with lots of action, monsters and a girl hero!