Better planet material?

[Glob Studios]

I'm working on a music video for my band. The instrumental tune is called Escape from the Mines of Titan, and that pretty much spells out the plot. I just started work, and quickly put together a scene. I just created a surface, added some hills and valleys, and put on some color and roughness that gives it a sandy look. (Saturn behind it is an actual NASA photo.) The real Titan has a landscape more like that of the moon, but I would be OK with keeping it sandy. I'd love to hear any tips or suggestions you guys have about improving the look of Titan (maybe a material or image texture?) It's not bad for the small amount of time I've spent on it so far, but it can be improved. Thanks!

 

[johnl3d]

close up material or further away ?

 

 

 

 

 

quick try

[Glob Studios]

close up material or further away ?

 

 

 

 

 

quick try

 

Nice! Some close up and some further away will be needed. I'd welcome ideas about either.

 

What did you do to create the material in your picture?

[johnl3d]

used new material plugin alibi planet and made it a displacement material after playing with the settings then colored the model

[robcat2075]

A few boulders might help the effect. Model a rough lump and put a few larger ones inthe foregournd and smaller ones in the mid ground and maybe none in the distance.

 

There are several Darksim shaders included with A:M that make terrain-looking surfaces.

 

 

If you do some hunting on "grayscale elevation map" you may find an image that could be applied as a displacement map to give you more surface detail.

 

This one isn't quite a proper elevation map but it's similar, height is represented as brightness:

 

[robcat2075]

another example

 

[Glob Studios]

Rob and John, thanks so much! This is a big help. I'll give it a try and post my results.

[thejobe]

Planet texture maps

some basic ones.

[Glob Studios]

Planet texture maps

some basic ones.

 

Thanks for this! The Pluto bump map (which is actually Ganymede) may be exactly what I am looking for.

 

-Vance

[John Bigboote]

Have you had a look at the DarkTree materials?

[johnl3d]

this is it

 

http://www.darksim.com/Repository/

[Glob Studios]

I want to thank everyone for their kindness in giving me lots of good suggestions. I've tried most of them, and thought I'd share my results with you.

 

First I tried just applying the photo texture shared above. It didn't quite give the look I was going for.

 

 

Next I tried the Darktree Lunar texture. This worked OK, but when I tried to scale the texture up much larger (100000%), A:M (15.0j) crashed. When I do the entire moon, it looks like this might be a good one to try.

 

 

Next I tried the displacement map shared above. When I scaled it up, I ran into some issues with the resolution not being fine enough.

 

 

I thought if I added some roughness, it might pass, so these are what I got when I tried that:

 

 

This was also going to make animating walks, etc. difficult because the height of the displacement doesn't show up in the choreography.

 

I finally went back to tuning just geometry and roughness, and got something I think I will go with, after a bit more tuning.

 

 

Anyway, thanks again for all the suggestions!

 

-Vance

[thejobe]

this was a test i ran to show different texture types

the foreground is a color map at 75 opacity with a color overlay and a texture map with bump setting at 5000%.

the background planet is material, darktree stoneIgneous.