Planet gallery on A:M Stills

[Julian]

I've just created a new gallery of astronomical art on A:M Stills with renderings of all EIGHT planets. (I've been working on these for the last few years, before the whole Pluto debate got started. I didn't include Pluto because any textures would be fictional until New Horizons arrives there in nine years' time.) Since I'm not trying to make a scale model of the Solar System, each planet and its system of satellites is a separate choreography modeled at a scale of 1/1 million (1 meter = 1000 kilometers).

 

Here are some samples:

 

I'm putting these renders up now because I've recently figured out some methods for using the Planet Glow shader effectively. Searching through old forum posts, I haven't seen much discussion about Planet Glow, there doesn't seem to be any documentation about it, and I don't recall seeing anybody using it in the last few image contests. If there's any interest, I could post some text tutorials to the Tutorials forum when I have time.

 

In the future, I'm planning to add renderings of the Earth's Moon (I had some, but I'm redoing them with higher-res textures), and eleven of the moons of Saturn.

[jpappas]

Julian,

 

Very nice! Yes, please share what you've learned about using Planet Glow. It's one of about a dozen things about A:M that I have on my "check-out-this-cool-feature" list.

 

-Jim

 

 

 

BTW, the swathes of nebula gas really add a nice touch to the images. Is that particle smoke or some other effect?

 

Thx,

-Jim

[robcat2075]

wonderful images. Very cinematic.

[ddustin]

Very nice work Julian!

 

 

David

[MMZ_TimeLord]

Please share your insights on the Planet Glow settnigs... It would be real nice to add to my solar system and earth project for the ExtrasDVD.

 

Beautiful renders!

[martin]

Wow. A tutorial with these as the images would be a big hit.

[Julian]

Wow. A tutorial with these as the images would be a big hit.

Well, now I've got a decision to make. Along with the tutorial, I was planning to include a sample project so that people can follow along with the steps. I want to make the project as simple as possible, so that anything that isn't relevant to using Planet Glow would be left out. That means I wouldn't want to include the star sphere, because I have enough difficulty explaining how to use it as it is. To minimize the size of the file I'm attaching to the tutorial posts, I also want to make the texture map files as small as possible.

 

I can use the Earth as the example, but it isn't going to have bump mapping or the extra layer of geometry for the city lights, and the cloud and the surface color will be baked into the same texture. There's a low-res star map I can use as a backdrop, but it has a lot of JPEG artifacts. What I'd end up with is a tutorial with this as the image:

 

 

I dunno, does that look okay to you? I want to have some kind of backdrop instead of a plain black background, because it would help illustrate the use of transparency with Planet Glow.

 

I should also point out that the blue haze that covers the edge of the Earth is an edge threshold gradient material. This means that the technique I'll be demonstrating uses a projection map instead of a decal to apply the surface texture. It's my understanding that a lot of people who render planets want to use a decaled texture, but I can't apply a gradient material over a decaled surface because decals always override materials. With a projection map, you can't get a realtime display of the texture, so you don't know what part of the map you're looking at until you render it. Now, I've tried adding an extra transparent sphere over a decaled surface, with the gradient applied to that sphere, but that slows down the render a lot for some reason.

[DanCBradbury]

For a tutorial, i dont think you should skimp anywhere on how you got your final product, unless there are some trade secretes you dont want to get out. I for one would really like to know how you got the realistic looking earth. All the times i've tried to recreate Earth it always turns out looking rather plane and dull. Yours has really 3d looking clouds, and i love how the west coast is all lit up. Very cool

 

also, how did you add all those images to the AM:stills? I've been looking for the past 2 days for the upload area in there, and it seems to be gone now :|

[Julian]

For a tutorial, i dont think you should skimp anywhere on how you got your final product, unless there are some trade secretes you dont want to get out.

So you think I should give up on including a sample project? Because I'm using 80 megs of texture files and I don't think it'd be worthwhile to ask people to download all of them. And what I really want to demonstrate are common mistakes that can be made when using Planet Glow -- like setting the transparency too high, or not using 100% shadow darkness, or the planet casting a sharp-edged shadow -- and how to work around them. I suppose the tutorial could be in two parts, first using the sample project and then giving a full explanation of all the techniques that went into the image.

 

also, how did you add all those images to the AM:stills? I've been looking for the past 2 days for the upload area in there, and it seems to be gone now :|

At the top of the page, there should be an "Upload File" button and an "Admin Mode" button (it'll say "User Mode" if you're already in Admin Mode.) Admin Mode is for creating and modifying galleries.

[DanCBradbury]

Hm, that is very large. I think a 1024x768 resolution version of the planet textures should be good enough, but what ever tricks your using for double layering effects and what not should still be included, at least for the earth one.

 

i guess there's a low limit as to how much any one user can post, because the only buttons i have are: my profile, FAQ, Logout, Album list, last uploads, last comments, most viewed, top rated, my favorites, and search.

[Julian]

BTW, the swathes of nebula gas really add a nice touch to the images. Is that particle smoke or some other effect?

That's actually a decal! I started off with Axel Mellinger's Milky Way panorama, applied the Dust and Scratches filter in Photoshop to blur out all the stars, blew it up to 9600 pixels wide, added detail with fractal clouds, and decaled it onto a sphere 11 kilometers in radius, so it would lie outside the star sphere.

 

Babylon 5 started a trend where CG artists would stick nebulosity all over their starfields, which serves to define the shapes of objects when they lie in shadow. But a lot of the time, people overdo it and make the nebulosity too brightly colored. B5 sometimes even showed huge nebulae even when the scene is supposed to be taking place within the Sol system, and obviously you wouldn't see any of that if you looked up at night on Earth. I prefer to aim for a realistic look by using only the Milky Way and keeping it fairly faint and subtle, they way it actually looks in the sky.

[DanCBradbury]

The sol system is extremely dark. I've seen pictures of the milky way from earth where the exposure had to be left for over 60 minutes.

 

cool effect though