Hi everyone, I’ve been working in blender for a while and I’m wanting to step up my planets to the next level the part I’m mainly struggling with is getting the amazing clouds you see in movies does anyone have any idea how to achieve this.
(first picture is my current work followed by desired results)
Hi Jared:
The answer is a lot bigger than the question but there are some “first blush” ideas that come to mind.
Firstly color will turn out to be a surprisingly large part of this solution.
Start by junking Blenders color management and replacing it with filmic or in some cases (very dark) raw color management. These selections will be under the color management tab in the scene properties(Shift f7).
Check https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/secret-ingredient-photorealism for a quick intro to this tricky subject.
That said You will certainly be going down the nodes rabbit hole with this one so you will be well served to bite the bullet and learn your way around 2.8 and eevee for this if you can afford the graphics card.
After your project is looking right you will find yourself seeing clouds differently. Kinds of shapes tell cloud stories visually, movements inside movements, an the possibilities with lighting just make my head spin. The more clearly you can articulate those things to yourself the quicker your successes will come.
Some more specific questions will probably get you better answers, the subject is bottomless.
Thanks for the reply. I’m actually working with the filmic color management. I’m working mostly in 2.8 ( I still am transitioning and do a lot of my initial setup in 2.79) I’d prefer to use cycles over eevee cause I’m not concerned with real time as much as accuracy. I posted this in the modeling section of support cause I’m primary concerned with how the clouds are made (I’ve tried using displacement on the current 2d sphere process with no luck) the material for them is also important however I feel like that will give me less trouble than creating the shapes themselves
For the second image i would start to use a creamy normal or height map, mapped on a second sphere. Then i would start with some satin shader mixed with SSS or some kind of transparency. The space between the planet and clouds could be filled with some emission shader that have some noise and wave nodes as input.
Hope that leads you to some approaches.
Thanks I’ll give that a try. I do 3 sphere (one surface one cloud and one atmosphere) I was thinking of doing a volume absorption shader for the atmosphere I’ll give it a try tonight or tomorrow and see what happens
If you have Photoshop you may want to look at a plugin called Lunarcell by Flaming pear software. it will let you generate the images for the layers you need. Ground, ocean, bump maps and Cloud layers. It will also let you download real time cloud maps.
I did find this also
Some other online sources
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=57747
Than you so much the second is a great resource. I could use a little help decyphering what he did with the cloud layers and releigh scattering. I tried doing what he explained but I’m just getting a bunch of layers of the exact same thing. And I’m completely lost on the releigh scattering part
Hi, Ok that I will have to sit down and tinker with myself. Might be a few days before I get back with an answer. I work 10 hours days Monday through Thursday.
No worries man I don’t have a deadline. I appreciate your help a lot.