Interactive planet-creation tutorial

[aszazeroth]

.... and here we have a snapshot of my map, with respect to major weather patterns laid out before. This is the "static" map, since the dynamic Maya fluids map will require a small farm / frame and I am currently fresh out of farming-time.


figure 15. Sample of cloud map with weather pattern. 256 Greyscale.

Now I guess it's time to swoop though all the maps once more... add some details and perhaps some more nightlights. Then we should be ready to fire up our favorite 3D program and do some renders...

Cheers
//Dr.Asz

[Ramiel]

Like I've said before... YOU ARE THE PLANET MASTER!

[aszazeroth]

Thanks Ramiel, a good word warms and fuels the inspiration !

[aszazeroth]

Time to head into the 3D part for some real renders.

First off you should by now have a few texture maps.

1. Colormap : The color of land and ocean with all the gritty little details.

2. Alphamap : The B/W control mask that will separate the the land and the ocean.

3. Specmap : The specular highlight level control map. A grey scale map that depending on your 3D program will either entire white or entire black at the ocean and have grey scale features (you could easily just throw in a dimmed version of the colormap) for the landspecular. Remember to add atleast some landspecular, especially for deserts and such, otherwise they will look bland in renders to come.

Note: Another important thing is to really make sure you include rivers and small lakes in the specular and alpha control maps

4. Bumpmap : Controls the bump, an effect mostly visible towards the terminus. You can successfully omit this one if you are doing full disc shots as any kind of overused bump will take away sense of planetary scale. Use very carefully and always in low numbers.

5. Cloudmap : The devil among sheep. Not only is it harder to make and takes more time, but it's also a nasty thing to handle. I prefer it to be atleast twice the resolution compared to the rest of the maps, it with 8k landmaps => 16k clouds. This is where you can run into memory problems. Maya does not like to load 16k maps at all unless you chop them up (I used Mental Ray memory map files). Max is not fond of them either (try trim down all unnecessary colors and use low samples where possible). Blender did not really care, but the resulting files can reach spectacular file sizes. Anyways there are ways around these limitations, you just need to know the tricks.

Additional maps that can be useful are,

1b. Nightlightsmap : Citylights and perhaps some very faint shine on desert and ice parts. Also use this map with caution. I tend to overbright the nightlights on my renders so I usually have to tone down it on later renders.

1c. Disastermap : Natural catastrophe map with volcanos , roid impacts, lightning, nukes or what-have-yous. Let your imagination be the guide.

1d. Irradiancemap : For gasgiants, I use an irradiance map to mimic the excess radiation released from potential gravitational energy conversion (Slightly glowing)

5b. Cloudbump : For closeups and for gasgiants.

All these maps can be divided into smaller parts, like for instance I might have a separate ocean specular than land specular and then join them in the 3D program. Consult your manual on how to do that or ask away in the Q&A forums.

So it's time to make the actual model then. I prefer using NURBS spheres whenever it's possible due to auto-tesselating at render time. With sizes I work usually with program-units and convert manually sort of like one program-unit = 100 km or so, producing a sphere with roughly 600 units radii for an earthlike planet. The actual model setup is then pretty easy.

Sphere 1 : Surface sphere. (Nightlights get blended in, in my setup (Deks' version differs)
Sphere 2b: SFX sphere (lightning mostly) , ridicusly close to surface in size. Usually not cast shadows, only receive on this one as it only "adds" light effects.
Sphere 2 : Cloud sphere. 1.02 times the surface sphere (depends a bit on planet)
Sphere 3 : Atmosphere sphere. 1.05 times the surface sphere (depends a bit on planet). Turn of cast shadows but keep receive shadows on this one

Now that we have the scene geometry setup I usually add a light so I can do some feeling / test renders.

I pick a nice basic shader, like blinn or phong (or more advanced if you feel the need to play around, for instance oren-nayar is good for gasgiants). <max talk> I setup the colormap in the diffuse slot, the mixed specularmap in the specular level, bumpmap in the bump slot. I usually keep the bump at about 3 to 5. If needed be, I also mask out the ocean/land parts with the alphamap to make sure I get only bump on the land and to add some noisebump waves to the ocean if I am going Low Planet orbit. I tend to like to keep the glossiness pretty tight, perhaps a good value of a few tens, like 30-60 depending again how it looks in the render. </max talk> This first surface part should be really straight forward in most 3D programs and there are only a handful parameters that need to be tweaked to your liking.


Fig 3D.1. Resulting shader for the surface sphere, part 1.

Now tweak the h3ll out of every parameter to learn their effects, render tests and play around. When we come back we will tackle the cloud sphere.

Have fun

//Dr.Asz

[Northern_Mind]

now i'm just blown away by this tutorial but are you coming back to this one ?

[aszazeroth]

Hey there Northern_Mind. Thanks. I will come back to the tutorial sometime, just have to deal with a few real-life related issues. I have the next post written on my PDA that I borrowed out to my sister (bad move, since I haven't gotten it back in about two months). Stay tuned ... If anyone have any questions or suggestions then feel free to discuss them here on the forum.

[Silverblade-T-E]

Aszazeroth, and everyone in general, I have a dumb question

*I have Vue, not MAX, so that limits my options, hence this question*
Say you wish to show a VERY close planetary approach or the like, but, as you note, the texture sizes and work involved are a LOT for whole world map. Could I use instead, a sphere sliced to obtain a square, UV Map it. Then use that to give proper planet curvature and more reasonable texture sizes?

ie, for example, say it's Earth, and your scene is say 50 mile sor so up. Why not cut out for example, a square of the Eastern US seaboard and Atlantic?

And, in reverse of your work, boolean (or whatever) the main planet, so you could switch from high orbit, to low, and use large texture as guide/original for close up one?

If that makes sense!

[aszazeroth]

Originally Posted by Silverblade-T-E

Aszazeroth, and everyone in general, I have a dumb question

*I have Vue, not MAX, so that limits my options, hence this question*
Say you wish to show a VERY close planetary approach or the like, but, as you note, the texture sizes and work involved are a LOT for whole world map. Could I use instead, a sphere sliced to obtain a square, UV Map it. Then use that to give proper planet curvature and more reasonable texture sizes?

I don't see any trouble at all in that approach. In fact I have used it myself on several occasions. My techniques are not really specific to any particular 3D package either. I have successfully made cool planets using other software than max too, although never Vue (yet).

Originally Posted by Silverblade-T-E

ie, for example, say it's Earth, and your scene is say 50 mile sor so up. Why not cut out for example, a square of the Eastern US seaboard and Atlantic?

Just remember that you will have to "upgrade" the resolution of that piece and the bump/normal map that can be omitted in orbital shots, must often be applied here.

Originally Posted by Silverblade-T-E

And, in reverse of your work, boolean (or whatever) the main planet, so you could switch from high orbit, to low, and use large texture as guide/original for close up one?
If that makes sense!

Last part did not actually make sense to me... But feel free to ask, experiment in a WIP thread, and explain

Cheers
//Aszazeroth

[Silverblade-T-E]

No worries, and thanks mate, awesome work you've done

And, in reverse of your work, boolean (or whatever) the main planet, so you could switch from high orbit, to low, and use large texture as guide/original for close up one?
If that makes sense!

I mean, to save texture sizes on close approaches, have two set ups or two scenes, copy 1st scene into second scene, then just use a split (or booleaned whatver your package uses) part of the original planet sphere, as talked about, for very close approach. So original uses large spherical texure map for planet, then transitions to next scene using square texture map on split part of sphere.
Yes I know, I'm a noob

[aszazeroth]

I think it might be time to round up this tutorial and transfer the goods to a PDF. Finally I decided to do the 3D part in Blender so that it will be fair use for all of you =)

This is what the result may look like (still tweaking and learning Blender myself). The textures use here are the ClubSFM textures that are available in the mesh download section.

Stay tuned... I'll post a small blender pre-setup soon.