Export color, height and cloud map of planet?

[andreas93609]

Is there a way to export the whole map of the planet? A map like the one i attached. Is there also a way to export the clouds to its own map?

[sboerner]

Hello and welcome to the forum. Great question. Sounds like you want to bake texture maps of a procedural planetary surface, correct? Do you want to capture just a color map, or also displacement?

I wonder if a spherical camera placed at the center of the planet might work . . . you could then hide the planet to capture the cloud layer. Not sure how this would work for the surface. 

Just thinking out loud here.

[Dune]

That would be the only option I see, using a spherical camera at the center of the planet and doing a spherical render (of large enough resolution, and with a ratio of 1:2). You'd probably need to use no lights, but plug all colors finally into a luminosity input. A small test will probably be best to do.

[WAS]

Here is a quick example project to fiddle with, to see if it's worth your time. For the displacement you'll want to use a disp to scalar, and not sure, but I think you need to then complement that, then range it with a colour adjust, and then do the same as textures and feed to a luminosity.

Example is a little contrasty, just trying to see what's going on easily. Planet model seems to show it's seams like she's been pantsed. :O Or I did something weird (high patch size for intersection zones). It's really late here.

Oops... yep, it's definitely late. Forgot to upload screenshot.

[WAS]

Here is an update to that ridiculous setup. Boy I must have been tired (daughter is on late night routine crying). Anyway, this has two surface layers at the end to export the colour and height. Though, I'm not sure if texture slope limits work right using minimum slopes with a inverted terrain, but I tried. Also forgot to feed disp to colour surface to have slopes actually work to be captured. 

Preview of it mapped to a planet for prosperity. It's blurry as I only exported at 2000x1000.

Edit: Added a image of the same deal, exported at 16000x8000 which is a good spot for detail at 1080p at least.

[sboerner]

Nicely done, Jordan. How did you arrive at the values for the color adjust shader?

[WAS]

Nicely done, Jordan. How did you arrive at the values for the color adjust shader?

I usually use max disp as the WP adjust to bring in all the details. Maybe s little over so no clamping of peaks to solid white. Maybe a little back up of BP to bring in valley disp. Though you may be able to simply export the scalar disp as 32bit exr. May be able to see the range without manually doing it. Haven't tried.