Hi guys, a few days ago I created a thread talking about rendering “Physically Correct” Planets. the focus was mainly on atmospheres and clouds. My work diverted to producing Planetary bodies.
I have been working on this shader for days and Im happy to share it.
Procedural Planets tend to use fractals, that creates perfect organic-ish features “too evenly random” giving us some “ok” planets.
The Goal is to be able to make Planets on the spot all inside blender. I took the same fractal approach expanded it without using any third party programs to create Planetary Geography and features, imitating (not simulating) how planetary bodies are formed.
Here’s the Shader Node itself, Some of the options doesnt make much sense like the Temperature. when set to high, it insteads floods the entire world with water, so if you want a dry hot planet just set water level to zero.
Biomes are generated with two conditions, Elevation and Latitude outputs as terrain data. Ice caps are seperated from this because I still cant make it behave the way I want it alone, much more worst when combined with Terraindata “generates grassy shorelines which is so unrealistic”
This is still in a very experimental stage. But serves as a proof of concept that You can actually create interesting planets entirely inside Blender Cycles “no more bland procedural planets! yay for unique looking ones!”
Right now, Im redoing the entire thing, instead of imitating geography I want to be able to simulate them. If i have to use OSL scripts I will but I’ll try to stir away from it as much as possible.
So play around with it, share your results in this thread! improve upon the current Shader if you want
Your work is really wonderful - I started following this when I saw it in the WIP section.
In order to gain more space for Terrain Color, I puffed the Color Ramp up by a factor of 3.9215 because I think the top-most color stop is set at .255 before polar caps? This gave more room inside for color details of course, BUT I’m wondering if I’ve goofed up other Nodes and Planet information?
Do you like the 3.9215 solution? Would it be better placed somewhere else?
My input would be that the warm water world looks overly bright? Looks like a fresnel falloff would really make this one pop (i.e. darker in the middle and the the current brightness on the edges to simulate atmosphere.)
Yeah that’s actually way more better, i didnt realize it back then ahaha.
Yes, it does generate those maps.
Cloud layers will be done as well
Im not sure about a tutorial but we’ll see.
So Sorry for necro-ing this post, i didnt realize it would get this attention so I kinda forgot about it on a long run.
i’ll be back with a new version as well so stay tune
This is a complete rewrite, it now emulates some sort of tectonic activity. and overall is much a simpler node setup
Added the terrain color multiplier so its easier to color your biomes
@Ensou - I will do Currently busy, busy, busy working again so i haven’t had a chance to give it a proper spin yet, but from what i did see in my short tests was that this looks to be a very cool and fun yet usefull resource
When i use the generator, do you mind if i jump into the node editor and add/edit elements of the node groups to suit my shading needs? Wouldn’t mind making a few more outputs
I want to start off by saying BRAVO! This is absolutely stunning work. I’m very new to blender but this is exactly what I’ve been looking for for a personal project.
I have one question (and please excuse the newbishness of it). I’ve got my node settings just right and I love the layout of my planet. However I’d like to be able to make a map of sorts of the “continents” that have been created on it. I see that you’re able to render your planet to a flat plane and make a map of sorts out of it.
Could someone briefly explain, or point me in the right direction as to how to go about doing that? I’ve placed a plane in the scene and applied the material, but it doesn’t seem to be very straight forward.
This is brilliant work, with some tweaking to the nodes in the planetary shader and playing with the cloud values and also replacing the atmosphere with a somewhat-physically-accurate volumetric node set I saw from this helpful post I was able to put together one of the most convincing planet results I’ve seen in Blender.
The cloud and Terrain generation shaders worked near flawlessly after some tweaks I’ve made and with some compositing, I must thank you for this awesome new desktop picture I got here!
Some suggestions I have would be:
add an invert node at the input for icecaps on the terrain node cuz right now it seems like it only works correctly with negative values which might be confusing
adopt the realistic volumetric node setups for atmosphere I’ve found from the link above
find a way to break up the band-like terrain generation when the scales of noise are set to low
