How would I go about making a water sphere, as discussed before in regard to creating a whole planet, glow? And how might I make different parts of it somewhat different colors, like some more yellow and some more red areas of lava oceans? Would I need to use a glowing surface layer on a sphere rather than a water sphere? I've tried several methods and none seem to work, especially making anything glow.
Also, on a somewhat unrelated note, how would I go about adding a spherical background texture and making it visible? I've been trying to figure this out too and it just seems to not want to work.
If you add a surface or default shader to your sphere, just set the luminosity to some color, and your sphere glows. You can add different (masked) layers of glow that way.
Background image needs to be spherical (2:1 ratio), and applied as imported image map shader into the background, with the image map shader's centre exactly as the background sphere center, and set to spherical. You'd better use luminosity there too, or it won't be (very) visible. So attach the image map to luminosity input of default or surface shader.
To be clear, Dune is referring to the Background object node. Just change its Surface Shader, using an Image Map Shader, and be sure the mapping is Spherical and position is set to the same position as the Background object itself, as Dune mentioned.
- Oshyan