Hello everybody: I'm trying to make a space scene with the typical starfield / planets, etc. I reviewed some of the prior posts and found some useful information about applying (and making) starfields to spehre objects. What I would really like is some tips to creating a nice looking planet (habitable) texture. AzChip's space scene was one of the best ones, an he says the planet's texture is a procedural shader... Is this the way to go or should I try to make it in Photoshop, and then apply the glow (atmosphere) as a different object? I'd appreciate any tips, and if AzChip reads it and explains with a little more detail about his planets and explosions.... : ) Thanks,

Hello: I did my first experiment over the weekend and this is the result. It kind of turned OK but I'm still having trouble with the planet's glow (atmosphere). I tried using some fog and cloud objects over the planet but as you can see the result doesn't look good. It well, looks like a big cloud instead of a glow... Any recomendations? I wouldn't like to add the glow in postrender 'cause it's going to be animated not a still. I made the starfield texture with a shareware application called Universe: http://www.diardsoftware.com/universe.htm It's PC only but with virtual PC you can make it work on the Mac. And the planet textures I found here: http://www.vterrain.org/Imagery/whole_earth.html There's a bunch of links in that page and some great hi-res textures. A whole weekend of searching and experimenting for a 3 second animation, geez.... : ) Thanks guys

I'm not AzChip, but I recall seeing an example where they put a second transparent sphere around the planet to produce the atmosphere effect. The 2nd sphere was about 2.5% larger than the planet.

Sorry it took so long to reply; I rarely get online from home these days. The atmospheric haze in my pic is added in post. I've tried bunches of variations on getting that kind of haze, and wound up using the technique you described for an animation. I actually used a fog sphere as opposed to a cloud sphere matched up with the planet. I played with the density, fall off, swirls, etc, and got something that worked for the shot I was doing (but it wasn't perfect by any means). The biggest problem I had with it was that the shadow of the planet didn't also cast through the "atmosphere." I'm working on an animation with a planet that has an atmosphere now, and am doing the atmospheric haze in post again. Here's how I'm working it. It requires a compositing software package. (I use AfterEffects 3.1 -- I've been too cheap to upgrade since the late '90's.) Build the scene (I'm still using RDS, although these techniques will work just fine in Carrara) with full texturing, etc. Cloak or make invisible all the foreground objects (ships, moon (if it passes in front of the Earthlike planet), asteroids, whatever). Render the background as a movie. Replace the planet with a sphere that's just a bit larger than the planet. This sphere should have a full white value in the glow channel. Delete your backdrop / background and cloak or make invisible everything else, and shut off all the lights. Render this movie. (You can render this in a fast mode -- it doesn't have to be smooth or detailed; you're just creating a circle that moves with the planet in the original plate.) Using AfterEffects or whatever composite package you have available (you could batch process this from a series of stills in Photoshop or another still image editor, too), put a gaussian blur on the white circle pass, lay it atop the background pass using the screen or lighten transfer mode, adjust transparency to taste, and poof! you have an atmospheric haze around the planet. To simulate the shadow half of the atmosphere, articulate the mask (by hand is fastest for me, using keyframes and a bezier curve while drawing the articulation) with a soft edge. Render out this movie. Finally, delete, cloak or make invisible all background objects in the original RDS or C scene. Load the movie you just rendered from AfterEffects into the Backdrop, and render your ships in front of them. (You could always render the ships as yet another pass with an alpha channel and composite them into the shot in AfterEffects. That solution might give you more flexibility, yet.) It looks like you got the procedural thing down for making continents and clouds on the sphere (unless that's a t-map from trueEarth). If not, let me know and I can try to post a listing of the settings I used in RDS for the texture. I'm working on a tutorial about the explosion technique; had one up a long time ago, but the site went away. Do a search here for explosion and you should find a couple times I've gone over what I did. What Nyar1ath0tep suggested works really well, too, although it doesn't give you the soft faded-edge look that you can get with the gaus blur effect in PS or AE. I've seen that technique used on CNN Headline News for their earth where the clouds are rotating independently of the surface of Earth. Very effective. Hope this helps and isn't too long-winded.

Thanks every body for the answers. I was imagining that I would have to render the scene in different passes to get a good effect. I'm going to try Final Cut pro, I hope it's as easy as Premiere ( I never got the hang of After effects..) The planet textures are jpgs from the sites that I found. I really appreciate the help. Thank you very much