I spent my last 3 days developing a relatively accurate and good looking atmospheric volume based cycles shader. It is universally adaptable to every combination of planet and atmosphere size and i tried to get it as close to reality as possible while still keeping an artistic value to it.
Here is a link to my YouTube Video about it, with download link to the Blendfile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5GtffIIJR8
I made an update to the shader node. It now supports mathematically accurate exponetial growth in density with the option to switch to the old stylized and new accurate solution with a slider. I also optimized the volume shader itself to have a little bit of anisotropy in order to get a more intens color shift as it is quite a lot more dominant on real photos than i imagined.
The lower two sliders now contribute a lot to the look as seen in the photos bellow.
Note that the looks are not representativ of what they can look like its just about the fallof of the density. I didn’t change the multiplication at all.
Atmo Changes:
I reworked most of the math and changed how the slider for fallof behaved with the accurate fallof. It is again much more precise.
From now on you don’t have to apply the scale anymore, as it is a parameter you can simply change in the NodeValues.
Earth And Cloud Changes:
I added support for quadrant based textures from the NASA website both for color- and nonColorData. They are called quadrantCombiner and you just have to go through the nodes and load all “1-Textures” (A1, B1, C1, D1) into the first four nodes and all “2-Textures” (A2, B2, C2, D2) into the last four textureNodes. The combiner will output 1 big picture.
For the clouds there is a similar node called the CloudHemiCombiner. Same principle but only 2 textures.
The Clouds are now pseudo volumetric with an array modifier giving them thickness wich works great as you can see on the pictures.
Both pictures with highres displacement and clouds! (combiners)
The stepping in the atmo comes from to few VolumeSteps and subdivisions on both the earth and the atmo! In the future you will need to set it to at least 256 by 128 for convincing results. as the atmosphere is so precise now that it makes a big difference how round the sphere really is!
As you can see the clouds are very nice using my pseudo volumetric approach! Even though I think I could lift them of the planet a bit more and give them more depth!
Yeah optikz is right! I accidentally replaced the standard earth texture with the quadrant combiner! Just download the right textures for your needs (quadrants for the quadrant combiner and standard single texture if you dont want to use those! Same for bump and clouds (hemicombiner for clouds)! Hope it helps!
I wouldn´t recommend it. Volumetrics render for ages and don´t work in this context in Evee. Trust me I tried to do an Animation with a Volumetric Atmo (not as good as this one).
It rendered for 4 and a half days straight, using 2 medium spec PCs on GPU and CPU.
