Not bad, not bad. Maybe the sphere in the middle is a little too big of course, but that is only a setting. BTW, someone at CGTalk Vue forum asked for Saturn rings some days ago. And someone else offered an answer. Maybe you peek in there as well!

The sphere is a sphere indeed (I mean not a planet. Not yet). LOL. For now I am trying to make an ecosystem with thickness/high (aisseur) density. Not easy. :-

Message edited on: 06/10/2005 06:25

And i am sure you want to fly by very close. :-)) A little too regular so far but looks excellent already - the right way i think.

Attached Link: http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/artofadreamer/tutorials/2/1a.htm

yah that was me, Wabe ;) remember planetary rings (in our SOlar system anyway, usual caveats abotu Scienctific knowledge apply) end up in "bands", because gravity from moons sort of "herds" them. so if going for a realistic look, you could have multiple rings with varied SIZES and colours of items.

That was my thought too - and that combined maybe with a rocking Ecosystem.

go to DENSITY tab, offset from surface, click the lighting flash button to edit the function, I added a Fractal, perlin noise gradiant, made the Largest Feature very large so lot of variation.

I also, for outer layer went to the Colour function of the ecosystem, and gave it a colour in there so that ring set would be different.

Added the ecosystem to Planes (made transparent)

Note that you can of course DUPLICATE the planes thus having several in same part of space, rotate one slightly to off set it's rocks, you can thus get cool animation features of rocks with differing speeds, plus more thickness

Sorry for the crudity of the end product but just quickly done :)

Message edited on: 06/10/2005 08:19

hm thinking about this... what about adding a torus, giving it a volumetric material to give haze or dust? Dunno if any of you saw it, but the BBC had a very cool drama a few months back, about a fictional research mission through the Solar System by a multinational astronaut crew on board a truly huige space craft. Scenes in Saturn's rinsg were VERY good

BTW, I was inspirated by the "Fish Schools" material from the EcoSystem material library.

ah good one, Phoul! :) Ah ha found it! (the TV drama) SPACE ODYSSEY VOYAGE TO THE PLANETS http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0007Z0O04/qid=1118410933/sr=2-1/102-0642766-0213725?v=glance&s=dvd http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/spaceodyssey/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/10_october/13/space.shtml

Trick. With the capture 3/5 you can see the value 75. In fact the cursor go to 10. 75 was enter manually. And I could enter more (so the thickness could be more important) ...
The trick mean that there is lot of place in vue interfaces where you can enter more. For instance for an illumation baking of a mesh the slider go to 100%. In fact I made some at 200 and 300% sometimes...
Have fun.

Fantastic piece of artwork engineeering here. Long live the function editor

I made some changes. Most important: new image map to create the density, and use it for the "offset from surface".

More later. The idea to put a map onto the offset from surface wa stupid. In fact it is not symetric north/south... anyway back to the 5/5 but without the 4/5 (blend). :-)

Wow, the last image looks great! Wish I had Infinite ;-(

Attached Link: http://www.belino.net/Anneaux_05_4s_LOW_WIP.mov

Nice one :) Always interesting to see work advancing before our eyes.

wow, looks really fantastic. And a brilliant idea Phoul to make it happen right before our eyes. I love that - to develop things in that way. We should have more of that here.

cheer :)

Btw, Phoul (or anyone else), if you'd like to try working with a much higher res ring map than the one you have, try this: http://www.digreal4d.com/saturn/rings-roundlg.jpg

Thank you.

Hello! I'm a brazilian enthusiast of 3dsmax and i was looking for a tutorial about saturn rings, but i only find with surface rings and not of this way, with rocks. Can somebody tell me were i can find a tutorial that explain how create rings with rocks, but for 3dsmax? Thanks!

Attached Link: http://www.belino.net/Anneaux_v10_480x270.php3

bloody good work, mate :)

Cool stuff, Phoul. You've inspired me to try animating my solar sails at Saturn still shot. Now I've got to find some time, too.

Good job! The only problem I have is that a planet is probably 1000s of miles across, and the rings 10s to 100s of thousand of miles. See the problem? They'd fade to just a shimmering, sun illuminated/planet-reflection lighted haze in the distance, and not anymore individual asteroids. They're not exactly a ring of breadcrumbs on a plate. It's a visually difficult problem, graduating from close and relatively identifyable rocks in the foreground to the distant dustmotes and finally individually indistinctable ring of haze.

Well that's why you use flat ring objects with a texture, at distance, in reality that IS how they look at a distance: just flat discs ;)
Only when VERY close do you see they individual particles.

See my tutorials on my site about planetary rings :)

Yes, I see. That's actually more what I had in mind. (nice generous and instructive site)

As for closeups, I think I will always keep the one Star Trek Voyager image in mind, where the Voyager travels above the ring plane of some distant planet, and the icy particles are visible and partially seem to reflect that ship. Very cool. It doesn't get much better than that. :-)

Karl

Glad ye liked it :)

yeah wonder how they did that shot, back then, with hardware etc of that time?

Yes, and all done with Lightwave 6 or 7 on workstations of that time. No Intel duos back then. Probably still Sun Corp. workstations with who knows what, inside.

With processors clocked at hundreds of megaHertz!