Sci-fantasy Chaos and Scale

Currently…


Previously…

This is a “thinking out loud” thread with no one particular work in progress; just techniques. Like another Blender user, I’m trying to visualize space and science in order to tell a narrative in writing. And like yet another, I’m trying to get good renders of fictional planets with minimum effort and maximum control (my words, not his!). I respect their efforts so much that I was inspired to throw my hat into the sci-fi ring…

Planet making techniques tend to drift to the fractal. Blender’s fractal techniques are okay, but don’t vary enough to make planets it’s said. But I wonder about layering Blender’s fractal abilities with Baking.

Convincing clouds are often a road block for easy planets and I use an outside program that’s ancient and a pain to install once downloaded. PlanetGen was made for D&D maps and never updated past May 4th, 2003 - so you’ll have to go through some hoops to install it. Once installed, it’s clunky and poorly behaved but stable. The colors produced can be changed and saved as new settings. I changed “Relief” map colors to a grayscale and use them liberally when starting a cloud layer. Although they represent land masses, in gray, they become convincing cloud coverage.

The PlanetGen output can be controlled as Mercator projection. Mathematically, that’s a mess - lots of cosines and formula. Practically speaking, it’s a handy way to view a planet. One Blender avenue for planet creation is with Noise. Noise attributes can be affected. Trouble is, how does someone ON a Noise generated planet have a MAP of that planet? My sci-fantasy story requires it. You can Noise your butt off but then how to make a map for the wall?

I BAKED the Diffuse to get a “wall map” of a procedurally generated surface. That had issues… Before that, I decided there wasn’t enough chaos in the landscape bumps. Apophysis comes in handy. It’s been used for ages to create fractal images and with a few curious clicks, you can create stunning 2D renders in any variety of colors. I used an old 4000px wide render to add chaos to the fractal planet that Blender can’t do alone.

Baking produced a strange problem - the mapping seam on my sphere was ignored. The bake used the sphere’s Global Y-axis as the poles. My poles were seamed at Global Z-axis. So my fictional planet is mapped strangely. I’ll investigate that.

With a proper Bake, the projection comes out Mercator and that can be used to influence additional Blender Noise I expect adding chaos and scale to the landscape that one layer of mapped Noise can’t do alone…

Attachments


With good clouds as a large image, adding Noise detail helps that image scale a lot. This image ignores scattering, refraction and all sorts of details. I just wanted to see if the cloud image could be made better for close shots and still look good from far away. I increased Noise Detail from 2.0 to 16. Looks good up close but creates a uniform layer of bumps. More atmospheric chaos would be great - I’ll tackle that later with better Mercator Baking (above)…


The PIXELS that you see bottom-right are from the landscape, not the clouds - the Apophysis image of 4000px wide was still too small for such a close view. I adjusted its scaling to .2 by .2 and that’s what you see in the far view; thankfully, repeating patterns aren’t visible.

The Apophysis image is a pretty one I made two years ago - just grabbed it nearly at random and was pleased with the result. It was never intended for this. I’ll make future images for this purpose so they won’t touch the edges.


NEAT! this is what you were talking about on my thread!
Here’s some things that might improve overall image. Never render with an ambient light. make sure your background barely emits any sort of light at all even if it has stars.

I’ll be moving on to create an entirely procedural cloud layer and share how to do it on my thread and probably it’ll help you :slight_smile:

Hi, Apophysis looks quite interesting, might give it a shot.

You may know this, but did you ever tried Gimps Filter -->Render —> Nature —>Flames or Render —> Fractals explorer,
they are straight forward, too.

Flame example:


Greetings

No DrBender! I never dug so deeply into GIMP but I use it regularly for basic things. That’s now on today’s short to-do list. We have a snow storm coming so, lots of excuses to sit and play!

In a recent article about “Goldilocks” planets that the Kepler telescope folks are keeping an eye out for, they mention Earth could only be improved by a larger core for stronger magnetic fields, and an atmosphere twice as thick as ours to better burn up meteorites. That begged the question of just what our proportions were here - it was a quick search…

With a diameter of 7,917 miles, Earth’s top-most blue is said to be at a “wall,” the Karman Line, 1.57% Earth’s radius which is perfect for Blender! So a Planet UV Sphere duplicated and Scaled 1.0157 presents, visually, a mere sliver above/around the planet surface but I’ll still have a go at that.

Various cloud types occupy various heights inside that 1.57% which looks like roughly 61 miles. Most clouds are relatively very, very low. Some daydreaming favorites like cumulus sit on a floor just two miles up. Rain making nimbostratus clouds sit even lower and the popular eye-candy Cumulonimbus clouds nearly scrape the planet but TOWER 5 miles up (a challenge for another day). So I plan for that duplicated Sphere to be a volume of blue with a fresnel and between the “atmo-Sphere” and planet, I’ll plant one or two surfaces for clouds where flames and fractals will provide for the highest types of clouds. That’s the plan. Thanks again for the info!

ANOTHER interesting fractal project from years past on that old Internet…


From Danish programmers came this Planet Map Generator. The online version max’s at 1,000 pixels for w and h because it’s hosted on an EDU server. Multiple color schemes exist and multiple projects are available. Pictured is Grayscale Square projection - square puts the poles easily inside the view and results in a straight line appearing as a sideways “S” like NASA uses on the iconic orbit track map. Downloading the application present problems for me. Support still exists and there’s a chat thread in which D&D is also discussed. I downloaded it hoping to break the 1,000 pixel limit but it’s command prompt only and keeps failing. So, the online tool is an inspiring place to start: http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/maps.msp

Humbled by the Node work out there! Just caught the Space:… thread too with those incredible clouds. So this update lacks the thunder it had before I visited tonight! I’ve eaten my words on the generated noise textures from Blender and am catching Node tutorials. They’re intimidating.

One tutorial made last year was for random procedural spheres which was really Volume and Voronoi density exploration. I thought instead of random spheres, I’d like to control one for the haze of atmosphere.


So I learned how. This is an Object Mapped sphere with Spherical Gradient with Volume Scatter Density controlled by a Color Ramp. I went with Alpha to control the Factor and sent it out to a Math Node. It’s been hard as hell to remember that most everything is between 0 and 1 for Nodes but I see now that’s the key to understanding how to speak to it.


So that Volume sphere above gets a planet and two cloud layers tucked inside - more cloud layers mean adjusting the Maximum for Transparent passes in the Render Panel. As I said, moments before posting this simple work, I was humbled by several other posts but it’s good to keep a thread alive anyway, man!

I’ll begin to practice making landscapes out of procedural tools in Blender, but in my search for other solutions, I found VP Planet Generator which is an old culmination of other old programs I’ve found. Maps can be made as artificial color or gray scale and applied with Cylindrical unwrapping if they’re projected as Square. It comes with other tools like star-field generation and clouds but they’re ridiculous. They’re programming exercises from as early as 1989! A hoot.

Looking good, how long is the render time with how many samples? wanna share a node setup or a blend.
Also a good galaxy/stars/nebula method:


DrBlender, Those links are pretty good. I like them both in part for different tips and when I get to backgrounds, I’ll turn to those for sure.

After two hours of constant mistakes, I have the concept for making a cloud layer change over distance. This way, multiple layers of the same cloud map will appear stronger nearer the surface of a planet. The proof of concept I had to settle with was for color for simplicity.


A sphere used as the center for Spherical Gradient can affect inner geometry depending how the Color Ramp is set. It’s really elementary but I was trying to affect geometry that appeared OUTSIDE the effect. So this outer sphere was first, then Alt+D spheres were scaled inside and the effect worked. I should note, the effect remained unchanged after Ctrl+J joining the three spheres to one object too.

It’s very simple (when you do it right!) but with 4 or 8 or 12 etc cloud layers all sharing the same image texture, the contrast and/or brightness could be affected on the way to the Mix Factor. It’s all in the math and that’s next for me. But if one were to Displace a hi-poly mesh, this would be a splendid way to change colors based on depth.

Yup. Needs a bump and lots of math, but it’s in there.


With procedural practice, I might even just make it out of some good base I create instead of relying on images. Then the turbulence and clouds appearing at different heights would be included instead of being just bottom-based.

Convincing clouds are often a road block

no kidding !!!

i make planet maps for Celestia and other sims

basically NOTHING on it’s own works well

as a link above ,the old “planet” by Torben Mogensen
http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/torbenm/Planet/
got a bug fix
the ascii mode NOW makes a 32 bit depth image ( well signed double )
there is no need for my 16 bit “fix” that is floating around the net

i use a mix of a few programs ( including Wilbur in WINE on OpenSUSE)

for clouds
Example video :

( the planet was a very quick 3 hour job)

For the clouds i used a perlin or plasma noise and “gaseous-giganticus.c”
in

there is also “earthlike.c” in the above sim that can create clouds but it is not that good YET

a old forum post
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=738

I think your work is excellent JohnVV - I’m a long time Celestia fan. I enjoyed getting lost in spaceship mode over a decade ago when I first stumbled onto it somehow.

I might be rediscovering old knowledge here but my new understanding of Nodes is pushing solutions my way. This test of concept allows me to let clouds hang over instead of just taper upward.


There are two Noise Nodes - one indicates where clouds should be; the other, with smaller settings, produces the mid-range and detail sizes of what appears. I’ve animated the smaller Noise Node so that clouds appear to come and go and fade in and fade out in the broad areas designated by the larger scale Noise Node.

This 20 sample image, however, took nearly a half hour to render at this size. Terrible. I’m off now to find out how to optimize settings and renders to chop this down.

The point I’m going for is that when a landscape has a mountainous region, clouds always appear and there as a part of a regular weather pattern, but they fade away as the wind moves them. So, in time, with future optimizing help, I’ll have dynamic cloud activity that obeys prescribed settings - clouds won’t just drift as a solid object with transparency, they’ll change and spawn and evaporate.

Above is a Cube with 5 of 6 faces removed. Arrayed 52 times at 5mm on the Z. When I test, it’s Arrayed 13 times at 4cm on the Z - same overall size, lower “resolution” of the Noise Node’s effect.

Per the title, got chaos! But haven’t even touched on scale yet. I’m really happy to have figured out the CUDA settings as simple as they are and succeeded in surprising myself with a “weather system.”


The top half shows more of the coming and going motion I have been thinking about. I should probably get a Vimeo account, huh? Watching the clouds merge is mesmerizing and they are told to appear primarily above the RED and off the GREEN via Nodes. With a slight mix, near red/green gets wisps that appear and disappear nicely.

It’s not Earth-like at all but I really like it because I don’t know what to expect. I’ve imagined this planet to vent human-toxic vapors that condense in the colder atmosphere and precipitate back down forming oranges around the greens. The wind is so strong at higher altitudes that the porous, red bedrock remains hard and exposed.


There’s a start. I’m wildly new to Nodes but I know the Separate XYZ is unused in this example. Any re-interpretations would be delightful.

I’m not sure how to embed a Vimeo player, tried, didn’t happen.

So, follow… https://vimeo.com/154072035

Reviving this thread after weeks of studying up on Nodes as time allows. Since scale is a big part of what I want to understand and convey, I’ll work toward procedurals knowing that with a circumference of 24,901 miles, one-degree around Earth is 69.17 -ish miles.


That’s understandable and puts a lot in perspective. So this modified Material Preview sphere has been given more bumps and a ridge and a belt of 360 spikes so I can see the up close and dirty scale of future efforts when I get back to it. The 360 spikes also have the benefit of displaying what the shadow fidelity will be.

So a feature that’s 200-miles wide would be 3-degrees wide. That’s useful in helping to keep things scaled.