This is some concept art for a game idea set on a fictional moon called Meylar. It’s supposed to be a dying world with little plant / animal remaining and is home to a penal colony.
I made the moon using the 3 spheres method (one sphere for the moons surface, one for the clouds and one for the atmosphere) and the gas giant is made with just one sphere and has day and night texture nodes for the light and dark side.
I followed Andrew Price’s very cool tutorial to make the bulk of it with a few tweaks of my own (boosted the red channel to make the glow from gas giant spill over to Meylar and added a red area lamp as bounce lighting for its dark side.
Please let me know what you think as i’m bit of a noob to this
I was also looking for a way to add a more intense glow to the gas giant in the compositor but i couldn’t find a way of doing it without affecting the moon as well - anyone know a way round this?
The moon is superb, you did a really good job there. Loving the hint of red from the gas giant.
Personally though I think the gas giant is distracting and I think you could get away with a simpler texture. I’m guessing you’re using Jupiter but I reckon something similar to Neptune would be better. Either way you need a higher res texture as that one looks a bit blocky. Also, you could lose the lighting on the darkside as it looks odd (no reason for it to be lit).
As for intensifying the glow in the compositor you can use the Filter->Glare node using the ‘fog glow’ mode. Reduce the threshold to increase the amount. You would probably have use render layers to keep it from interfering with the moon with Alphaover to recombine the 2.
Thanks for feedback Goggins i’ll try the alphaover… does that mean i need to render the moon and gas giant in seperate scenes? (i’m useless with the compositor haha)
The darkside doesn’t use any lighting from lamps but the darkside tex has some emmisive turned on - i was trying to make the cloud bands look heated but couldn’t get it to look right, maybe i should scrap that idea
Thanks! I was originally gonna use Gliese 581 as the system for the game to be set but they make new discoveries there every 5 minutes haha I’d end up designing something contradictory so I changed it to a fictional gas giant (for now)
Hi, I’ve done a mock-up of your scene and played around with the compositor and render layers to try and get the effect you are after. Sorry about image quality, the falloff glow looked smooth in blender but couldn’t get to save properly. I’ve attached the .blend so you can get an idea of how to use render layers with the compositor. Hope this helps!
