Final class project

[Paga]

How could i also create a similar surface to what my planet has with your moon shader ?

[Helmut_S]

I recommend playing around with procedural noise textures a bit. Hook a ColorRamp node between the noise and an emission shader, and play with noise parameters, scale and detail predominantly, and change contrast using the
ramp - you’ll find it creates shapes very similar to the ragged structures formed by craters, valleys, continent boundaries …

You can use that to add more detail to the shadow parts of your planet:

• use the maximum value in the MapRange node (“To Max”), to change visibility of shadowed parts (zero: no visibilty)
• add a noise node, a color ramp, and feed that into a math multiply node you hook inbetween the Map Range and the multiply node following it, and play with the noise settings and contrast until you like what you see …

You can continue to tweak the shader that way, add more procedural textures to create subtle color variations, create structures that overlay other structures and so on.

[JWC (The Blender Boy)]

Hey, I started working on a semi-similar project, for you, and here are 2 tutorials I think might be helpful:
This is for the dune creation:

Blender Tutorial - Create a Stormy Desert in Blender

And this is a nice procedural sand texture:

Easy Procedural Sand Material - Blender 2.9 EEVEE

And for the spaceship crash sight, I would recommend sculpting marks in the sand where it might of impacted to show a more traumatic scene, and also, why are the two humanoid characters so different in size?

[Paga]

If i make the max to value into 1 and the rest like this , the planet looks like a light bulb

[Paga]

Any specific marks or just messing around with sculpture ? The 2 humanoid are supposed to be like that

[Helmut_S]

Well.
Try a value in the range between 0 and 1 for “To Max”, then, and leave all the others at their original settings (except you want another sun in the sky).

Hint: 0: fully transparent, 1: fully opaque. Have a look at the screenshot, it is set to 0.1 in that example.

[Paga]

Did some changes with both of your recomendations and looks like this atm with both planet and sand texture

[joseph (J)]

I know the different scale of the people is intentional but it just doesn’t work. The small one looks like it’s floating in space, just a 2D image copy and pasted on your render

[Paga]

I understood that , i changed the scale and seems to look better now

[Helmut_S]

Well, I’m happy to help, however, as a little side note: I did not share these examples to give you a one-by-one recipe. I did it to give you some ideas, in the hope you are able to make use of them. Applying random changes might not yield anything usable though, you need to attempt and understand the underlying concepts, to a degree at least.

Some more explanations regarding my “moon shader” idea because I feel that might not be self explanatory: this setup utterly ignores physics, light direction and so on, you are responsible to set everything up/adapt it manually to your environment. This includes light direction, color/intensity of the moon’s lit crescent, texture sizes and so on.

Did some changes with both of your recomendations

Well, what changes exactly?

Light direction is determined via the vector value in the normalize node, the dot product node processing it will return values in a range from -1 to 1, the subsequent map range node is used to define the shadow’s sharpness - adjust the “From Min”/“From Max” within that range until you see the result you want. “To Min”/“To Max” define minimum/maximum opacity of the lit/shadowy area.

Use the emission shader’s color and strength inputs to adjust the crescent’s color and brightness.
Don’t change the transparency shader’s color (=leave it 100% white)!

In your new WIP I spot brightness in the planet’s upper right which indicates you have changed the light vector (the one in the normalize node), and/or “From Min”/“From Max” in the map range node. I recommend resetting “From Min”/“From Max” to 0/0.1, and readjust the light vector. (-70,-40,-40) were good values for me, I’d suggest you start with those values, and try to adjust the first and last component to rotate the crescent around.

Again, don’t touch transparency color (100% white!!!). You managed to render that planet’s shadowy part darker than the sky (again), that shouldn’t even be possible (because “shadow” is achieved via mixing emission and transparency (= sky color)) except by messing up the transparency shader.

[JWC (The Blender Boy)]

You see how big your spaceship is, and it looks crashed, but either way, a spaceship doesn’t put down in the sand with so few marks in the sand.

[Paga]

What would be your suggestion to make it more realistic , scuplting isnt working properly in the dunes so i cant create marks

[JWC (The Blender Boy)]

Why? Could you maybe show us a wireframe?

[Paga]

[Paga]

Managed to fix the sculpt issue , added a few marks as the one you can see

[JWC (The Blender Boy)]

I mean like jagged marks that look like this:

or if you want it to be long abandoned, maybe smoothing more like this, with sand enveloping it:

[Helmut_S]

Regarding the ship’s impact site and traces, you should make a couple of decisions about what you want to show us before you start modelling.

In that case: has the ship crashed a couple of moments ago, a couple of weeks ago, last year, or is the event decades (centuries) in the past? What’s the story behind that scene?

1. crash has happened moments ago: we see fire, smoke, crater, burning/smoking debris around the impact site
2. crash has happened a while ago: crater and other crash marks still visible
3. crash has happened ages ago: no crater or crash marks, instead sand has formed new dunes around the ship, covering parts of it, predominantly in the wreck’s lee

PS:
the moon’s lit side is pointing away of the sun.

[Paga]

The ideia was to make a crash that happened long time ago but would be a interesting project if its not too much complicated for a newbie like me to make a crash that happened moments ago or a while ago aswell

[Helmut_S]

@Paga

The ideia was to make a crash that happened long time ago

That’s actually how I saw the scene.

If you want to add more detail to the dunes, I’d focus on adding leeward dunes to the wreck, and maybe traces of sand in its superstructure. There shouldn’t be any visible impact traces left in the surrounding desert (except, maybe, for additional detail, parts of scattered, larger fragments that have not yet been entirely covered by the sand …).

[Paga]

How about this now ?