Some Planetary Practice

[Brukhar]

Just some experiments with planetary clouds and stuff, attempting to discover the freelancah and nvseal techniques.  I'm actually a Vue user for the most part but for the life of me I can't get a good looking planet in Vue xD so, TG2 FTW

[Brukhar]

And actually, a question to go along with this...is it possible to render clouds with an alpha channel...that way I can swap out the planet's texture for a photo-real one?

[PG]

You can change the cloud colour, scattering colour and ambient colour (that one's on the tweaks tab of the cloud object) to some hideously garish colour. I use it to see the cloud edges more clearly. (233, 68, 247) for each setting.

[Henry Blewer]

You could use a single color for a mask, say on the planet. Then turn off the Surfaces visible in the render tab. This would render the clouds only. The last step render the real images onto the planet, then use the single color for a mask in a paint program.

[Oshyan]

If you turn off rendering of the planet surface (in the Planet Shader settings) and turn off the atmosphere (uncheck Enable in the Atmosphere node's settings; don't disable atmosphere from the Planet Shader settings), then you will get an alpha of the clouds in your Temp folder (use Explore Temporary Files from the File menu in TG). But you do have to re-render to get this.

- Oshyan

[TheBlackHole]

I'd just try to get the textures on the planet instead of having to deal with them in another app. When I have time I'll post a few image maps you might find useful.

[Tangled-Universe]

I like the second image the most. The glow settings look really nice, especially the striking yellowish/reddish glow on the foreground glow against the bluish glow of the background clouds. Nice work!

Martin