Digital Art Zone

I’ve reviewed some past scenes and found only one real solution. First, everything should cast shadows and receive shadows in the normal manner. This includes both the solid planetary surface and the blend transparent cloud sphere. The secret is that the second sphere really must fit the solid sphere tightly as a second skin almost.

Technically, Bryce is not doing it wrong in your first upload (not the last upload, which is showing some other problem). In the first upload there is a secondary ring of sorts on what should be the shaded side of the planet. I explained that the ring you are seeing is technically accurate, because if clouds were as high above the ground in real life as they are in our artistic renders they actually might receive light from the sun even on the shaded side of the planet. So it seems Bryce handles the issue with such purity, that we have to keep it simple and keep it tight.

It is tempting to want to see shadows from the cloud layer visible on the planet surface when viewed from space, but alas that is not usually the case except for closer shots.

Best of luck!

Rashad is sending you in the correct direction.

The cloud sphere must match the planet sphere as close as possible. If your planet is, say, 250.100 units in size, then your cloud sphere should be 250.105 units big (any closer and you may start to see weird material interactions).

At these remote distances from the planet, it is not essential for the cloud sphere to cast shadows - but it is essential for it to receive shadows and for the planet to cast shadows. The light sourse must have shadow casting enabled.

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It’s cloudy over Hull again.

I have started from scratch again. I will try to reproduce this project to be sure, but I *think* I’ve got it working - thanks!

From the Materials Lab drop-down I clicked on “Normal” and “Additive” and set the transparency to 100. Oddly, when I retest with my Mars I had to set this to 0 to make it come out right. ??? I must be overlooking something - so I will continue working on this.

The outer sphere is 0.05 units larger than the inner sphere.

This is what I got:

khobar95,

As you may have surmised, and to answer your question, yes…the cloud layer is a second sphere.  So the first sphere is the planet texture and the second sphere is the atmosphere effect, and the third sphere is the cloud layer.  As I stated before, and as the others have said, the cloud and atmosphere layers must hug the planet tightly, like a second skin in order to look realistic.  This can be done by simply duplicating the planet sphere and changing its size to 101%, that way you have a new sphere that is 1% bigger than the planet and centered perfectly on it.  Then all you have to do is change the texture or material.

The next step is to make a bump map (not technically needed actually) and a specularity map to make the oceans shiny and the land not shiny.  But play around with what you’ve learned so far and we can get to those later.

My finished planet.

I played around with this, after grabbing an earth texture off google.  I think I fiddled with shadows too much, but essentially its 3 nested spheres, the planet is 100 units, the cloud is 102 and the atmosphere is 105 (less and it wouldn’t show)