Digital Art Zone

How do I create a photo-realistic planet, say earth, in DAZ Studio 4? Can’t seem to get it to look right….

The first thing to think of when designing anything to look realistic is to think about how it’s constructed in the real world. The Earth, for example, has an atmosphere which generally gives off a blueish hue. A good way to emulate this in Daz is to wrap it in a sphere which just barely exceeds the size of the Earth itself and invert it so that the polygons face inwards. You can then shade this so that the atmosphere appears behind the planet.

Another tip which often gives better results is to do some post-processing in Photoshop. Render out the planet against a blank background and apply a layer effect over it for a glow. You can then composite it all back into a single image.

Another thing to note is that clouds also cast shadows on the planet surface, so using a separate cloud layer for planets will help add that extra realism.

sounds good, will try the invert thing. how do you invert the polys?

There used to be a freeware space scene creator out there… maybe eight or ten years ago?  Was it Universe?  I can’t remember.

When doing this scene:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2332697&user_id=647585&np;&np;
I used three spheres.  One for the earth surface.  One for the clouds, and one for the atmosphere tinted blue.  I had to make my own transparency map for the clouds, but I found them on the web ready to wrap around a sphere.

Here’s a new render that better shows what I did.

here’s another I just did

cool, will try that too…. will post what I render. thanks.

One thing, and I haven’t figured this out, because I haven’t spent any time on it: if you look at photographs of machines in space (satellites, orbiters, etc) they have very VERY harsh shadows.  Pretty sure this is due to the lack of ambient light in space.  Now, planets with atmospheres, not so much.  The moon, of course, has harsh shadows.  But if you look at the earth, it always has fuzzy, soft shadows going to the dark side.  The other part is that when something is in shadow, it merges with the background black of space, becoming invisible.

So if you want to make your renders look hyper real, you’ll figure this part out… and when you do, you WILL tell me how you did it!

Here’s one…

Inner sphere…texture mapped
Outer…a volume shader applied (I’ll post the ShaderMixer network later…)

LOL… will do.

here are a couple of examples

mjc1016 - 24 November 2012 01:13 PM

Here’s one…

Inner sphere…texture mapped
Outer…a volume shader applied (I’ll post the ShaderMixer network later…)

SUWEEEET!!! I’ll be anxiously awaiting that one.

there is a fantastic cloud texture on this page:
http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/s3tc.php

Scroll down

Salashin’s Space Enviro Kit LE hosted here http://www.blackraven3d.com/ is a niffty Space kit I have used in the past.

Here’s the network….hopefully the forum will keep the images in order…

The Ambient Strength setting can provide some very interesting effects.

The Gain setting is another fun one to play with. 

Here’s a render with it set at 30%, as opposed to the 5% in the first render…

The second one is the same shader, with Ambient color set to an orange at 100% and the sphere color yellow at 100% Ambient at the same color as the Diffuse…only a specular light is lighting this scene…