[Rodo]

great, now I get it... I'll give it a shot later on when I can finally finish rendering this in high detail.

[watsisname]

OHGOD Resolution levels OVER NINE THOUSAND. 

Seriously though, that's simply astounding.  I'm particularly impressed by Blender's atmospheric rendering; that's the most realistic effect I've seen in quite a while.

[Rodo]

I don't even want to ask Herra for his PC's hardware specs... I sense I'll have a pain in my jaw for a couple of days if I ever come to know such information.

[SpardaSon21]

Chances are he has at least OVER NINE THOUSAND megabytes of RAM.

[Aardwolf]

The only thing it seems to lack is the coloration of clouds / the atmosphere in the sunrise region.

[Herra Tohtori]

Chances are he has at least OVER NINE THOUSAND megabytes of RAM.

Actually I only have over four thousand megabytes. Four thousand ninety-six to be accurate. The render was done on 64bit Linux, so all 4 GB were in use. My CPU is an AMD64 Athlon X2 6000+ and the motherboard is Asus M2N-Sli Deluxe with FSB of 400 MHz (DDR2 memory runs at dual rate of 800 MHz) which has nForce 570 chipset.

Nothing too extravagant, as you notice. It just takes a lot of patience to work with this sort of textures. Render times are often quite long. I really should look into how to hook my other computer (AMD64 X2 4800+, 3 GB RAM@400MHz [200 MHz FSB] ) into a render farm of two PC's...

Aardwolf: I suppose some sort of reddish hue effect could be added near the terminator. I'll research on that bit when I'm working with the model next time.

[Rodo]

I'm surprised, and you can actually work with that kind of texture sizes? I got several crashes after trying to open a 21600x21600 texture in blender and even in gimp... I figure it must take ages to open a file that size for you as well.


Back on topic, I'm having troubles with my render, It turns out that the clouds are not blocking the citylights after all .

I'm using a crazy method to render this (sorry if your eyes hurt after reading the following):

I made a new sphere with a lamp opposite to the sun and then set to no diffuse. Then I just place my citylights texture on the sphere and set it to affect the spec and the spec color, after that I play around with the specularity filters untill I get the amount of lights I want.

Problem is... I can't seem to find a way to block the specularity from reaching the clouded parts of the citylights map, you guys have an idea on how to do this?

I might have to go all the other way and use the other method described on the tuts, the one with the emit texture with a second mesh covering the day side.

[Scourge of Ages]

Hello fellows!

Here is my first ever complete planet! Considering that, I'm quite proud of it.

Please, offer advice and such so that my next will be much more awesome (awesomer).

EDIT: First image moved down a few posts, for easier comparison and less space-stealing.

(old) P.S. It looks really cool blown up to 12 scale in-game with most of it concealed in shadow.

[Black Wolf]

I think it's too consistent across too large an area - the coastlines all seem to have an identical gradient, the terrain is all green etc. etc. add some deserts and randomize that pale blue drop-shadow (I think ) you used on the coasline a bit.

[Herra Tohtori]

What I really like are the distribution of landmass, the clouds and water. Polar areas seem a bit hazy though, and land texture could be a bit more crisp.

And like BW said, the highlights on the sea next to the ocean are somewhat bright - I usually don't brighten the water around countinents, but instead try to turn it into somewhat greenish hue from the deep blue on shallow regions. If you have the planet source material around in layered mode, I recommend playing with colouring the highlight to yellow and then testing different layer modes to produce a shallow-water sea-green effect that you like.

Overall, I really like it.

[Rodo]

That's your first attempt? very well done.

You'll learn new tricks in the way.. for now I would say you could add a gradient layer over the planet mass to simulate the atmosphere.

What program are you using to make the planets?

[Scourge of Ages]

Thanks for all the advice!

Changes made:
New texture overlayed on the original for sharper terrain.
Lightened the whole thing a bit.
Toned down the coast, and made it a little more green than blue.
Increased the atmosphere effects.
Added new terrain types. They're subtle, but there is now grassland, plains, and mountains. Sorry BW, I couldn't bring myself to drop deserts on a jungle world.
Added a little more cloud cover, while cleaning it up all around and adding a bit of shadow to the clouds.
Rivers!

First version:


Version 1.5:

P.S. Done all in Photoshop

[Snail]

The big yellow blobs which used to be mountains look a bit... Off...

You could pass them off and say they're, like, volcanic sulphur deposits or something I guess.

[Rodo]

Try this:

make a copy of the terrain layer (only terrain if possible, water will look odd with this steps).
bump/emboss the copy and place it over the original terrain layer.
then make the copy layer like....30% alpha transparent.

[Herra Tohtori]

The overall brightness was better in the first one, in my opinion.

[watsisname]

The overall brightness was better in the first one, in my opinion.

I agree there.  Also I feel the brightness is a little bit too uniform over the dayside -- if you can have the intensity drop off a little bit as you go from the full-lit areas to the terminator, I think that would help get a more photo-realistic effect.  I also notice what seems to be a very narrow atmospheric highlight/haze across the sunlit limb, which if expanded out a bit might help in that regard, too.

As for everything else, I really like your landmass shapes, distribution, and texture.  The polar regions especially look great.  The surface colors are a bit vivid in my opinion, but the variety and detail are good.  All in all this is fantastic for a first planet.  Keep it up!

----------------------------------------------

On an unrelated note, I played around a bit with making more "realistic" atmospheres in GIMP, especially with trying to mimic the way that colors change from the day to night side, and the "haze" effect near the limb.  Here's what I got when trying to reproduce the earth's atmosphere.  There's some nasty banding going on that I need to fix, but at least it shouldn't be too noticible when actually placed ontop of a planet.


Edit:  Placed over earth-surface to demonstrate:

[TopAce]

Oh, man. That Earth is so beautiful.

[General Battuta]

Something about the Earth really doesn't work for me. I think it's the lack of weather systems? It looks a bit glossy.

[Droid803]

Yeah, needs clouds. Seems to just be an example though.

[Aardwolf]

Why is the haze circular-looking? Shouldn't it be an ellipsoid extending from pole to pole like the terminator is?