Ok. I’ve read like a hundred posts on people asking questions about planets and the atmosphere glow. People have mentioned that they were going to write tutorials but I haven’t been able to find one.
I’m working on my first planet for my movie. I finally have the textures at a point where I think they look pretty good. But now I’m having problems with the glow.
Put a single vertex in the middle with a halo texture. Didn’t work for me because of the size of my planet mesh. The halo size would not go big enough.
Make a sphere about the size of the planet and use a halo tex. The blurriness of this looked good but I couldn’t get the halos on the dark side of the planet to be dark.
Make a sphere little bigger than the planet and use a blend texture so that the sphere is somewhat visible on the light side and not at all on the dark side. This looks pretty good, but it does not look blurry or fuzzy enough. Rather, there is a stark outline around the planet.
See it here: http://movies.breittechnologies.com/PlanetWithAtmosphere.jpg
I think there must be some combination of 2 and 3 that will do the trick. I’m looking for the best method here that will hopefully look good close up as well.
If you can help me come up with something that looks good, I swear I will write the tutorial for it. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Just cut your sphere in 2 parts, make it smaller than your planet and apply a halo ; you’ll end up with your nice atmosphere glowing on the lit side of your planet, but not on the dark one.
You can check the result here on a pic I did last year:
If I would model planets I would be satisfied with option 3. (Blend–>Sphere texture)
Here is what I got with it.
(image deleted)
I used two blend --> sphere textures both zzz and nor coordinates.
Color and Alpha button for the first,size about 0.7, mix mode. (For the glow)
Alpha and size 1.3 for the second. Sub mode. (For a more diffuse appearence of the outer rim)
Material: Alpha 0 and Ztrans.
This can be a little bit improved (???) if a blend–>sphere texture on zzz nor coordinates is added to the image texture of the planet itself.
Alpha 0 but no Ztrans, otherwise you get in trouble with the stars.
Sorry. But those two examples are not really what I’m looking for. The sphere with a blend texture doesn’t look real enough. Especially close up. And having only a half sphere with a halo tex looks like the atmosphere ends abruptly.
