Hey everyone,
I'm working on making a skybox for a UDK project I'm working on but having great difficulty making the giant planet I have in my sky appear to be filled with clouds (gas). I have tried using the node setup from the gas planet .tgd floating around on these forums but it just isn't working for me, it appears to affect the planet I'm on (Planet01) rather than the one in the sky :( So everything is set-up I believe it's just the 3 cloud layers "centre" and "altitude/depth" need adjusting/tweaking.
I have attached my .tgd and an image, if someone could edit it and then re-upload and explain where I was going wrong then please do :)
Thank you!!!
For coloration without resort to image maps - for that distance to the giant planet you don't need an atmosphere (on the giant), whose thickness would be small compared to the planet size. Put color right on the planet, you could try a surface layer of one color and a surface layer of a second color, with the latter having a blending shader that masked part of the overlying layer. In the blending shader, stretch the noise (perlin will do) in the x and z directions but not in y. This will smear the noise in the mask in the equatorial direction on the planet (y being aligned with the planet poles). Push the color offset toward black to get some masking. Thus you have the basic banding. Set the scale of the noise in the blender to be roughly 1/10 the planet diameter or whatever size you want the bands. From this basic approach you could replace the solid color of the surface layers with color power fractals inputed to the child layer of the surface layer node. The detailed look of Jupiter-style cloud band intermixing is another and harder story. I think cyphyr figured it out. -Bill
Wow Thank you very much Bill for a detailed reply, just what I was looking for ;D
I will give this a go and reply with my results, thanks again!
You're welcome...the same technique can be applied to cloud noise with lots of mixing possibilities, for close or hi res views. Bill
Quote from: billhd on January 06, 2012, 05:53:49 PM
...
The detailed look of Jupiter-style cloud band intermixing is another and harder story. I think cyphyr figured it out. -Bill
I did ?
Not that I remember posting here and I can't find a link. But thanks anyway !! ;D
Your method is good Bill and for a more "Juipter-esque" look I think you'll be better off with an image map or for animation an image sequence as a base mask.
Cheers
Richard
Well I decided to use the Image Map shader way as this was easier for me to do and this is what I have come up with. I have added an atmosphere to the planet so I could give it some ambient light so that the other side of the planet was visible. I've always tweaked my planet1 atmosphere so that it is clearer to see the planet. I want a night sky as though it is dusk. I suppose next step is to get my render settings right and then create the skybox :)
UPDATE:
So I've created a quick test render of my skybox and have noticed my image map distorts, how should I apply the image map as at the moment its set as through camera. I also plan on moving the planet round to more of the centre of the panorama
Set your image map to spherical projection and make sure the images co-ordinates match those of your planet.
:)
Richard
Thanks for the tip! ;D
But I already figured out my issue lol only problem I'm having now is rendering my skybox with the horizon lower as when I place my skybox into UDK the horizon is way too high and my horizon is appearing high in the sky. I've tried pointing the camera up in Terragen slightly but this doesn't really work with the tutorial that's up on here for making a skybox. Any ideas how to get a panorama with a very low horizon?
I was thinking maybe render with double the height then crop the image so the horizon is low
Hmm.. If you think about it... Lowering the radius of the planet would make the curvature more drastic and thus causing a lower horizon line? Not sure how badly this will affect everything else..
Another would be to correct it in post or just raise the camera ?
Also isn't there a possibility to move the skybox somehow? I mean cant you move the actual skybox inside UDK? I believe it works atleast with skydomes..?
Quote from: freelancah on January 10, 2012, 03:42:19 AM
Hmm.. If you think about it... Lowering the radius of the planet would make the curvature more drastic and thus causing a lower horizon line? Not sure how badly this will affect everything else..
Another would be to correct it in post or just raise the camera ?
Also isn't there a possibility to move the skybox somehow? I mean cant you move the actual skybox inside UDK? I believe it works atleast with skydomes..?
Thanks for the reply :)
I'll give the planet radius thing a go and see if that helps. Moving the camera doesn't make a difference unfortunately no matter how high or low >:( . Yea you can move it but the horizon is appearing so high up the skydome it would need to be put way too low in UDK.
I did try rendering at double the resolution and then cropping it. It kind of works but I'm not 100% sure it's looking right
Yeah you might have to go to very low values to reach some sort of visible result