Good morning lads!
It took me some time, but I finally got around to actually do some more space art again.
The first animation is a sunrise of Mars. I couldn’t decide on the post, so I did two versions. One more realistic and the other more cinematic as seen here:
I’ll just quickly re-post the production summary from reddit here:
Believe it or not, but rendered on 100 samples, where 50 would have been enough already.
The scene is made up of two spheres. One with the Albedo and Normal map, the other one is a mix of diffuse and transparent with a Layer Weight facing node to give the diffusing fake volumetric effect on the horizon.
The glow is done in the compositor. The planet gets masked out by an ID mask, then run over a glare node, mixed with the seperate background (Would need to be rendered as standalone if using stars as BG etc.) and put behind the planet to keep the glare node from blurring the planet surface itself.
The light comes from a sun lamp. The actual visible sun is just another small sphere with shadow rendering turned off and an ID mask. It gets masked out in post, completely turned to white, multiplied by a factor of 4 (I believe, too lazy to check now), and then run over a second glare node.
The lense flare is done in post in Hitfilm Pro 2017 with the automatic lense flare plugin. Also the second scifi-post cinematic style was applied in Hitfilm.
Edit: the next step is to achieve this realistic effect with earth. Challenge accepted!
Which brings me to the second animation I’m not as proud of, since it’s also not completely finished (lack in post).
Sunrise on Earth: https://gfycat.com/FlakyCriminalHoatzin
The raw process is the same, although a bit more tweaking was needed to get the atmosphere to work and animating the color of the sunlight for the sunrise.
The entire background of both shots is filled in post because the transparency looks quite a bit better when applied directly through the transparent background effect rather than through an ID mask, so either a potential BG has to be rendered seperately, or the planet has to be keyed out by an ID mask.