There are four nested spheres. All of them have Texture Type: Clouds. The outer three have Material Alpha set to zero and cast Z Transparency shadows. A Cloud Texture too, (used as a Stencil) defines the land and sea shapes of the fouth, innermost, sphere.
The idea is that by only using Blender’s internal (procedural) textures, new worlds can be easily made just by twiddling with the textures’ settings.
The atmosphere glow has it’s own Render Layer. A filled circle is used in a Layer Mask to stop the glow from appearing in the foreground.
These are pure Blender renders, that is, no external paint program has been used to make adjustments or fix anything up. Though, (in Blender) Hue, Saturation, and Gamma were adjusted with Compositor Nodes. Render times are nine and a half minutes.
Have you thought about applying some distortion to the clouds? as in add->distort->translate node and applying a noise texture to it. Might give it a more dynamic look.
For the rest: good work. I tried this myself several times, each time to be disappointed by the incredible instability of the texture nodes. Crashes every 20 seconds here.
EDIT: There are actually a couple of games being developed that do just this, in realtime and a lot more detailed. Don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but they’re fun to try: Spaceengine and Spaceway
Didn’t use texture nodes. I ought to learn how to use them.
Not sure what you mean by the clouds needing to be more ‘dynamic’. There are two problems, with the clouds (it seems to me). They look too flat. (Perhaps better clouds can be made with volume materials?). And they should be spiralling like cyclones and anticyclones.
Thanks for replying!
-f.
p.s. your links reminded me of Celestia the real time planetarium program.
Made a second glow render layer. (Wanted it to be more noticeable beyond the planet.)
Got the clouds influencing the normals.
The clouds of the inner sphere are working better now. (They are the thin, small, wispy ones.)
The composition (it seems to me) is better now. The large clouds make a diagonal leading the viewer’s eye into the picture. This was just a matter of trial and error with the Clouds texture settings. I made an attempt at rotating them with Texture Nodes but I liked the clouds better without this effect.
I hope this is it - that I will stop fiddling with this now and move on to other projects. But wait, should the glow be so high beyond the horizon? And should there be more detail in the land masses? Oh no…
