Creation of 2 "sister" planets around a new sun. Please be sure to atleast put your sandals on before walking across this terrain, and bring a personal A/C unit if you have room! By the way, are we on the moon of the planet in the sky, or is the planet in the sky the moon?
Specs:
This is another image I had sitting in my "to be worked" folder from a long while back.
Render time: 40+ hours over 2 cores, though I spent plenty of time trying to dial things in - especially the planet/moon in the sky (which I am still not satisfied with).
Quality: 0.8
The terrain is a standard TG2 fractal, but I added a highly displaced image map for the spikes after the compute terrain node, so the spikes would follow the curves of the terrain, rather than just point upwards. The surface shader itself was covered with an image map, but since its so dark, you can't see it.
The hot glowing surface was created by using the default shader's luminosity option, set at 10, with a power fractal plugged into it for the color.
The clouds are standard TG2 cumulus, tweaked as needed. There are two cloud layers. The first is the high cloud layer, with a distance shader to mask out the part of the sky to create a hole so the planet/moon shows through. The second is the smoke/mist on the surface, with the fractal size brought down in size (for more detail).
The background is an image map shader, which I custom made in Photoshop. However, the larger stars are real TG2 lights, which really worked out nicely.
The planet/moon in the sky was really tough to get just right. I power fractal just didn't work well, so I ended up using an image map, which you can't even see. The atmosphere and cloud layer was raised significantly for detail. The hot spots are an image map (since power fractals didn't cut it again), plugged into the luminosity function of a default shader, settings at 10. I am STILL not satisfied with it! My goal was to have smoke coming out of the hot spots, and being blown by the wind, but I didn't pull it off as well as I could have. I ended up having to post paint a few things to fix it somewhat (see below).
Which brings me to: post-processing.
Only 2 major things done: the planet/moon tweaks as described above, and the main sun bleeding through the clouds (a known TG2 issue). I had to clone that out back to how it should have been. These tweaks only took a few minutes. The rest of the post work was minor contrast, color correction, sharpening.
My comments:
The image was just too red and saturated so I tried to tone that down a bit in Photoshop. Its also a bit grainy, but I don't feel like rendering it again since I've moved on to another project. And of course, I am disappointed in the planet/moon in the sky. It should have been better! But, I'll take it for now.
Many thanks for viewing.
