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How to make a realistic planet in Blender
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This tutorial works also with earlier versions of Blender than 2.30, besides the fresnel effect that, in fact, in 2.23
I had to fake. To fake the fresnel I used two ways: the first, the faster for rendering, used a "blend" procedural
texture; the second, slower for rendering but more effective, used a circular set of dupliverted lamps to light
the "borders" of the planet.
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Here above you can see the effect of the two techniques. Anyway, because now Blender has a true fresnel effect,
we don't need anymore to fake it.
The following is the technique I used for the "Golden Planet" in the image Ovoships, using Blender vers. 2.31a. |
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The set
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The first thing to decide is: have we to do a whole planet or just a slice of it?
For the Ovoships image (and animation) I opted for the slice (a "dome"), because there was no need for
a whole sphere. The technique, anyway, works just the same, but with a slice we can
easily use very big and detailed textures. So, let's start adding a big uv-sphere primitive to our scene...
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... and then erase the unnecessary vertices to have the dome.
This way we keep the geometric centre of the object as if it were the whole sphere.
This is useful for the next step.
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With SHIFT-D duplicate the dome two times, each time increasing
the size of a bit (for this use the N key); for example, the starting dome will have size = 1.000, dome 2 will
have size = 1.002 and dome 3 size = 1.004. The first dome will be the planet surface, the second one the clouds layer and the third the
fresnel effect of the atmosphere.
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Then add a tube primitive to the scene and scale it to make it larger than higher (see the following image).
I mapped the tube in uv mapping, on each face so to have a perfect ring, with this "gradient" texture:
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This ring must be placed around the three domes; more details about the material at page 4.
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Here it is our completed set. I placed a spot with shadows as key-light, a "quad/sphere" lamp at the geometric
center of the domes to fake the planet radiosity and an other lamp on a side, to have a light blue radiosity effect from space...
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Go to the next page.
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Italian version
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All these pages, images and characters: © 2002-2004 Enrico Valenza
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