How to make planets in Blender

hey this is daniel grove thanks for checking out this video i love sci-fi i love space and i love making planets in blender it became kind of an addiction for a while and it was really fun to finally learn how to make what i wanted to make so in this video i'm going to share with you how to create your own custom planets in blender okay so first i'm going to show you how to make the planet the light set up the procedural starry sky and we're going to apply textures to these spheres as well as atmosphere and clouds and a bunch of other little tricks to make it look photorealistic and up front i do want to be clear about this these are not procedural planet textures i'm using texture images that i've gotten from a variety of sources online that were at the time free however now the good ones that i have uh the artist does charge for them they're only like two dollars each i'll put all the links for everything free and paid in in the description down below so go buy them they're cheap um any of you guys out there that are like surface painter pros and are really good at texture painting please make some planets there's a big market out there for people like us that love to make planets and as far as i can find there's not a lot out there that's available so please somebody make us some planet textures to play with that are high resolution and look great my favorite artist that i've found online is robert stein iii he also goes by dual he made a bunch of that i got they were free like years ago now he only charges about two dollars for each of them again the link for that it will be down below but when you're looking for textures to apply to these planet spheres this is a really big they need to be equal rectangular maps that means it's a one by two ratio rectangular image and it wraps around a sphere perfectly because the top looks a little squished and weird we'll get to that in a minute okay two more quick things before we get to making our planets i'm using blender 2.91.0 and the two add-ons that i will be using in this project which are free is uv squares and node wrangler i think node wrangler is now included in blender because it's awesome uv squares is also very helpful you can find that on github and i'll put the link for that down below as well okay so let's make this scene so i've got a sun here i'm going to make sure it's set to sun i'm going to put the brightness to 4 i'm going to uh shift a for add i'm going to add a sphere a uv sphere now down here in the options let's increase the polygon count maybe for segments 80 and rings i don't know 40 or 60 something like that and let's size it up you can do s2 to scale it up by two and maybe again it really doesn't matter how big it is it's all relative but i like it to be kind of large i'm going to press w and get this object context menu and i'm going to choose shade smooth that's going to get rid of all the polygons and add that smooth shading all around next let's go to our world properties i'm going to open up the node view which i'm going to expand this by putting my mouse in the very top corner it turns into a crosshair click and drag down and i'm going to change this view to the shader editor okay and i'm going to change to world mode and here we go this is our world so i'm going to show you real quick how to make the starry sky it's very easy if you're new to nodes don't worry this is probably one of the easiest tricks you'll see so we're going to add a varroa noise so shift a for add click on search and type in vor there we go now shift a click on search and type in ram for ramp there's color ramp right there's the second one plug in color to the input there and then plug in this color to right there all right now i need to switch to uh render view so we can actually see the world we're building behind us let's zoom out a little bit we've got this crazy veroni texture i think it's actually distance let me try that yeah there we go we want the dots these little cellular dots okay now let me zoom in so you can see this more clearly okay we're going to change our scale to anywhere between 200 and 400 let's start with 200 there we go look at all those dots now they're not stars yet but they will be so let's drag our black point up and our white point flip flop it boom look at that we've got dots and they are in fact dots of light because if you look at the procedural pattern that was being created it's all they're all circulars they're not like cell shapes um they're not jagged poly polygonal cell pieces they are circular so we can do that we can control the brightness if we move the black in it makes it let me get rid of my ground there we go you can click on this overlay button by the way to get rid of all overlays including the ground beautiful starry night if you drag our black up it adds the stars get bigger to the point where they're just blobs so don't go too high keep it around you know 0.15 and higher if you want less stars move it over to the left you want more drag it back closer to dot two i wanna put it like a dot one pretty nice okay boom look at that two nodes and you have a procedural never ending seamless starry sky you are welcome okay and we've got our sphere we've got our sun let's turn our overlays back on there we go and i'm going to turn off the ground or the floor rather because we're not modeling anything we don't really need a floor grid let's press the letter 0 to get to our camera if you don't have a camera you'll need to press shift a and add camera right there and then when you press the numpad 0 it'll go to camera view i'm going to zoom my camera out by right clicking on the border or where on my computer i have right click for select you may have left click select and i'm going to press g z and then z again now i can zoom out on the normal of the camera it's basically zooming in and out okay and we're going to go to the camera settings let's put this uh focal length up at a high number maybe 100 right there so a higher millimeter focal length is going to give more of a telescopic look which is the opposite of a wide angle lens most space photography we see is of course telescopic lenses very high focal length um probably up in the thousands but we're going to stick with 100 to 200 to give it a nice flat look all right let's get to making this planet texture so i'm going to select my planet and i'm going to switch my node editor back to object and this does not have a texture yet so i'm going to click new i'm going to name it this is really big especially if you're going to make multiple planets in one like blender file name everything name the objects and name the materials very well because you'll get really confusing what's what so i'm going to name this planet 1 surface because we are going to have multiple spheres on top of each other for the different parts of the planet there's going to be one for clouds um and the atmosphere around the edge okay so we've got planet one surface now there's no nodes here there are nodes but you can't see them and i don't want to go searching for them so here's the trick press a which will select all the nodes and then press your period num keypad and it basically solos in on whatever is selected or all that is selected so that is an easy way to not get lost or get unlost in your node editor okay i'm going to press shift a search image here we go i'm going to drag the color to base color i'm going to leave i don't want it right here and we need to leave some room in between the two because we will be eventually adding a bunch of stuff here to make things look more awesome also we need room so i'm going to open an image and i'm going to go to my planets folder one of my favorite folders on my hard drive and this has a collection of real scans real images as well as fictitious planets um by that robert steen the third guy who uh you can find the links down below really awesome work and there are websites where you can get real images of our planets and moons which are good to play with you can tweak them you can mix and match them you can of course change the color there's a lot you can do with real images so if you just want to stick to free images don't worry you can still make some cool stuff so i'm going to open up an image of mars very easy to find those online click open and now look at this it's automatically mapped perfectly i did not even unwrap the sphere yet i think that blender knows that this image is a two by one image or is it equal rectangular shape it's a perfect one by two rectangle image which means it's going to wrap perfectly around a sphere let me show you how it does it look at this if i press tab go into edit mode of the sphere this is all the faces and the triangles on top because there are some triangles in the sphere on the top so what's going on here with this unwrapping is basically the center of the image here is the center of the planet i'll show you by selecting and turn this on there we go so if i select the equator this way it's in the middle of the image if i select one of the poles it's up top let me just faces it'll be easier to see there we go so this pole is on the top south pole on the bottom and the reason why the image looks funny is because this top radius is so narrow it's basically zero which is right here at the tip as we go down the image you know a few pixels down the radius is it's larger which is here around the edge of this ice cap as we go down of course the radius increases of the sphere so things are getting larger so that's why on the image it's it's stretched but it's going to be wrapped into a tiny pole on the top and bottom so um yeah then we've got our mars made now if you have trouble unwrapping this if it doesn't happen automatically like it did for me one thing you can do is you can use the uv squares add-on and tab select all press u and unwrap and then you can go to uv and uvs to grid squares or uv uvs to grid with respect to shape and that will basically make any shape into square faces on your uv unwrapper screen and it's very helpful that's why i love that uv squares add-on and honestly maybe that's what's giving me this perfect unwrap i don't know so i'm using cycles right now and i am in my rendered view so this is like real-time rendering with cycles the reason why it's so quick is because there's really no ray tracing happening there's no samples being used right now because i've got one object floating in space and there's no light bouncing on anything so let's go into our nodes for the planet texture okay so i've rearranged my screen layout to be a little bit more visible for you guys especially if you're on a smaller screen now we've got specular which is the amount of shine that the sun's going to give on the surface and we've got roughness if we have revenues at zero uh it's basically a perfectly reflective glass sphere at this point if we put any other stars or planets around it it's gonna start reflecting things so we don't want roughness at zero we want it um you know somewhere in the mid-range because if you look at pictures of the earth you can see the sun is kind of giving a specular you know spot on the ocean but not on the land we'll get to that later so you can play with your specular and your roughness to get somewhere where you think is realistic and one one good way to add some realism to the surface sphere is to give it some bump so let's do shift a search type and bump enter put it down here you'll notice these dots are purple now not yellow because they're not coloring they're not carrying color data like this one is it's carrying normals data so drag the normals connect to this normal of the principled bsdf now we need some information to turn into the bump which we're going to use this color data from the image texture and put it in height now look at that this is super crunchy not realistic you can't see this much detail from space it's just not how things work so we're going to turn down strength to dot one and distance to dot one you can do a little bit more if you don't see enough result maybe.2 but don't go up too high because when things are like really bumpy it kind of ruins the illusion right but you do want a little bit of bump to give some more detail on the texture now the higher resolution your images of course the better your plan is going to look closer up if you've only got a 2k image you can't get in really close you've got an 8k image that's a different story okay so we've got our surface sphere here i'm going to make next a cloud sphere which is not really realistic from mars so i'm gonna do uh shift d enter so i just duplicated this sphere if you look over here oh i did name this i'm gonna name sphere as planet one surface there we go sphere double o2 is going to be planet 1 clouds there we go and we are going to give this a new texture because right now the cloud sphere has the same texture as the surface here we don't want that so i'm going to just uh click x so there's no texture add a new texture i'm going to name this p1 cloud for planet one okay and it's the same size as the surface sphere so we can't see the cloud sphere yet if you click s and scale it we can of course but we're going to scale it up just a little bit bigger than the surface sphere so press s for scale and do 1.01 there we go so it is just a little bit bigger than the bottom cereal underneath it now we're going to play with transparency and use a cloud texture which you can also get this one for free online to give it some clouds so i added an image node and go back to my planets and there's a really good image you can find online of the earth's clouds 8k that's awesome open image and here it is i'm going to connect this to base color now we just got the clouds there's no transparency i can't see mars underneath that's where this comes in handy so if you click on a node and press the letter g that's grab which is basically your move tool you can rearrange things i'm going to do shift a type in mix shader shift a again type in trans parent right there and drag this green to the very first shader spot there we go and automatically everything's working okay i can see transparency through to mars but that's because we have a slider here so it's basically a cross fader in between the two but i want to get rid of the the black parts to make it transparent so we're going to use this image as a mask so click on color drag it over to factor and voila now we can control how selective this mask is by making a color ramp so shift a ramp right there make sure it's on the line that's going from image ping-ponging over to factor now we can control the mask we can make it you know barely any clouds or drag the block down and drag the white up and basically get a lot of that image texture and look at this we even have some shadow from the clouds hitting the surface which is cool maybe a little bit too much distance there you could probably size this sphere down just a little bit using shift you can scale things down much more minutely there we go that looks good a little bit of blackness under those clouds is a good thing and also because this is a separate sphere you can press rr to just freely rotate your cloud sphere anywhere you want and that looks pretty cool too we're going to now make an atmosphere sphere on top of this that's fun atmosphere sphere shift d to duplicate that and s 1.01 to size that up a little bit now let's name everything planet 1 atmosphere and just do atmo let me size this up a little bit so you can see it atmo okay now instead of deleting this texture and making a brand new one like we did earlier i'm going to do a new material but basically it's going to copy what you have but make a new material so because we're going to use this transparency trick but in a different way so we need to name this p1 atmo okay we've got our surface our cloud and our atmo on top let's delete this image this and this there we go now we're going to add a diffuse shader super basic now we're going to add a layer weight which is basically like a fresno it's going to give us this edge this uh you know soft edges and then a color ramp ram color ramp here now let's plug in fresnel into here color into factor all right now if we control shift click on this fresnel or layer weight node we can see it's giving us a circular gradient but it's not quite dark enough that's where this color ramp comes in and by the way this is using node wrangler to basically preview one node at a time so ctrl shift this guy now we can see what this gradient's going to do oh look at that nice here's a cool trick you can expand the size of your gradient node for a higher resolution there we go and also to make it super smooth which is what we're going for change this to b spline okay so we want this to be white on the edges which it is there and black and the center now b-spline is super soft and non-aggressive gradient it's very organic which is great but we need to add a little bit more punch in the middle so add another color drag it over here and make it pure black maybe move it down a little bit there we go okay and now around the edges we also want this to fade away so let's plus use the plus key to zoom in and we're going to make a little bit of black around the very edge of the sphere so add another color by clicking the plus drag it up here and make it black okay now i need to drag it in so we can actually see it there it is it's coming in right next to the white cool so it's black in the center white and then it fades off kind of like the atmosphere does around the planet awesome okay let's zoom back out and let's use this as a mask also no matter where your camera angle is this circle stays how it is that's how fresno works so we're going to use this as a mask and we're going to plug it into the mix shader right here so ctrl shift this guy to get it back to normal this is how it should look there we go let me zoom out to show you what's going on okay so the fresnel is giving us this the gradient is giving a contrast to look like this is plugging into here as the mask which is giving us a mix of diffuse which is this guy i'll give it a color blue and transparent right here see these two guys are getting mixed by this circular gradient so we can change the atmosphere color by of course giving it a diffuse color for alien planets you can use some toxic co like green or yellow or purple or pink light blue is a safe one if you want to go for like an oxygen you know habitable planet which mars is not there's like very little gas in the atmosphere there but you know i'm just using this image because everyone can get this image online and you can change how much atmosphere there is by playing with this gradient it's so much fun so if you feel like your air your planet is super green lots of oxygen generating organisms and ocean and stuff like that give it a lot of a little a lot of atmosphere you know make it real nice and friendly looking like that but if it's more deadly make it more of a little rim and give it a scary color too that's that's nice let's rewind and go back to our surface sphere and i'm going to show you how to mix textures to give some more interesting and more you know complex looks so i'm going to turn off my atmosphere and turn off my cloud meshes so i don't see them they'll still render but i can't see them and if your outliner doesn't look like mine you can change it by clicking on the little funnel and turn on the screen and the render button the screen basically means it's not being processed by your cpu or ram but it will still render because the camera is turned on all right so we've got mars but what if i want to mix in a little bit of something else let's click on the mars texture node shift d to duplicate it let's open up a different texture i'm going to open up this one of mercury because again i feel like this is one i'm sure you guys could find online for free so we're going to do mix rgb which allows you to crossfade or mix or blend rgb you know color signals which is this so with mercury in color 1 and mars and color 2 we can crossfade 0 which is all mercury and 1 is all mars but what if it's in the middle 0.5 now it's half mars half mercury we can change the color of mercury to add some more interesting looks by doing shift a type in hue hue saturation now let me zoom in we can move the hue slider and change the color of mercury cool mercury's got some really nice impacts on it that i like and streaks it's really cool so we can mix between these two we can use blend modes just like photoshop has we can do dark in overlay is really cool probably turn this all the way up if you're using blend modes unless it's too much you can also turn it down but i personally like multiply soft light and overlay to get some cool mixing of the two or you can use a texture or procedural texture to mix these two together so i'm going to turn this all the way up and i'm going to add a noise texture and this is going to work as our mask plug in factor to factor of the mix rgb and now if i preview this by doing ctrl shift click on the noise texture i get this kind of blurry noise i can make it more gritty and more textured by turning up detail and turning up roughness we of course have scale but it's really faint i don't know why it's so faint so i'm going to add some contrast with a color ramp drag the black point up there we go make sure you're previewing the color ramp so ctrl shift click that right there now if i plug this color in to factor of the mix rgb we need to get back to a normal view look right now i'm viewing this gradient i don't want to see that anymore i want to see this guy so ctrl shift click right there alright so i'm using a contrasting noise texture as my mask if i make it really contrasty which is this by the way it's very black or white look at that we've got some mars peeking through and savina speaking through you can flip-flop them by switching them from color one to color two just like that pretty cool of course we've got our color control awesome we've got a viral outbreak turning the planet into a sentient celestial object and back in our textures there lots of things going on um lots of lots of possibilities you just got to be creative and play around with it all right let's add a moon real quick so i'm going to zoom out shift a add a sphere i'm going to move this up here and just make a texture real quick if you have node wrangler enabled you can also click on this shader and disk so do press ctrl t move it over here click open i'm going to open up a moon texture i have somewhere in here where is it all right and now if i press period because i have the moon selected it zooms right into it and there we have our moon i see these ridges because it's not smooth so w shade smooth there we go and we need to add a lot of bump moons are messed up moons have very imperfect surfaces so we can put this pretty bumpy more than we did the planet here we go let's zoom back out make it a little bit smaller move it out here there we go here's a cool trick we can make this moon automatically rotate around itself if you want to do that go to the object information and pick your axis whether it's i'll do this to the z-axis click on it press tag or number sign frame multiply by 0.01 let's see how that goes i'm going to go to my material view so it's faster shift spacebar to press play there we go so the number sign means frame number sign frame means put the frame number in that spot and then you can multiply it by smaller or bigger numbers you know to make it faster or slower we need to start parenting things to the surface of the planet so single click on your surface mesh over here in the outliner then shift cloud and atmosphere now we can press control p which is the parenting feature and do keep transform so now look at this they're gone but they're actually inside of this surface so if we click on surface plane and move it around look at that the atmosphere and the cloud sphere stay with the surface now for ease of arranging your scene you can actually turn off the selectability of the atmosphere in the clouds so if i if i select this i can't select the atmosphere of the clouds here it's actually selecting the surface which allows me to move it around you know rotate it all kinds of stuff so with the surface planet selected let's go to our object information i'm just going to do um y number sign frame multiply.01 and press play now i'm in i'm in rendered view so it's trying to you know re-render every frame if i go to material view the atmosphere kind of gets funky so i'm going to turn off atmosphere my clouds also look kind of funky so i'll just turn those off for now there we go we got our mars rotating and our moon is not parented to this yet so i'm going to select a moon select the planet control p keep transform there we go we've got an orbiting moon and planet so let's pick a nice angle and render this thing i'm going to show you a trick for orbiting your camera around the planet press shift c to put your 3d cursor right in the middle go into your camera view select your camera by right clicking on the border right there and then change your uh i guess it's point of origin the 3d cursor so now if i press r to freely rotate my camera it's rotating my camera around that 3d cursor which is where right in the middle of the planet so let's get a nice view right here grab our sun we can also rotate that look at this around the origin and i'll go into rendered view to see what's going on here let's turn back on our other spheres to make it look pretty nice now remember the sun is not actually here in orbit it's super far away right this planet is going around the star so the direction of this it looks kind of funny because the moon is right here but it would really be like light years away over there wow so there's our render it looks pretty awesome for a very small amount of work now there's a lot of tweaks you can add to add more texture or interest to your planet i'm right off the bat i'm seeing my stars are way too large so i'm going to size those down by going back to my node editor here i'll show you a few more tweaks we can do for the planet i'm going to increase the scale to 400 and then drag this in a little bit so the dots are smaller but there's more of them cool now we can use procedural textures to add more variation like we did up here you can even use a noise texture for a really nice cloud effect so i'm going to show you how to do that add noise i'm going to add it here instead of this image texture and add this right here instead of that image texture now this is super blonde boring so remember we need to add some contrast so i'm actually going to so i'm actually going to put it like this noise into color ramp color ramp going into these guys over here again i am editing my cloud texture that we made earlier so drag your black point up that not impressive i know but wait there's more increase your scale increase your detail and your roughness we're getting there we're getting there and now here's where the magic is i'm gonna get a better view here here's where the magic happens increase your distortion just a little bit look at that get some really nice wavy clouds and if it's too if it's too cloudy you always turn that down by playing with your color ramp if you go one way it's going to add more cloud if you go to one the other it's going to go less and of course you've also got scale so you make them very large wispy clouds and that looks pretty natural even for a procedural texture not bad if you combine that with some mousse grave you know gritty texture you can get some more imperfections loose grave is also good for adding dirt onto the planet so let's go let's do that so i'm going to click on surface up here i'm going to get rid of my atmosphere and my clouds i'm also going to get rid of these guys up here and we're just going to add in some mousse grave texture on top of the mars surface so grab height put it in color two now it's on mix mode right here mix and it's at number one it's all the way up so that means i can see nothing but color number two which is this guy okay we go to zero that's mars one is moos grave so let's zoom in i'm going to increase the scale increase detail to 16. dimension to zero already we get this really gritty texture if you agree if you raise your dimension you'll get softer and less you know less dirt you can use this to generate oceans or land masses or clouds or just variation in your color of a texture that you already have so let's put this as multiply and turn it to zero and then slowly turn it up a little bit look what happens as we get up to closer to dot five look at that the black parts of the moose grave texture are now overlaying on top of the mars texture and they're making them darker so this automatically doesn't even look like mars anymore okay so this is cool and also what about oceans let's get a uh more green planet texture say earth and let's make the ocean reflective so let's get rid of this guy get rid of the mix them out plug in your earth texture into base color there we go super basic nothing crazy going on right but this blue ocean is just flat it just does not look cool and the continents and the ocean reflect the same amount of light that's not physically you know accurate so let's add a color ramp put it here in the middle drag your earth texture to the color ramp and then your color ramp to roughness all right here's where things are going to get more interesting as we make your gradient generally brighter we're getting less reflection on the land more on the ocean what if we reverse it we make it darker look at that the land is wet and shiny as well as the ocean is too but we don't want that we want the land to basically be not reflective an ocean to be reflective play with the specular here the roughness is coming from the color gradient so there so as the sun moves over the land mass we see those little blue dips which is the water shining in the ocean shiny that's good so again this gradient is black is all the way to the left white is pretty far to the left as well around 1 5 to give that look let's add in the cloud texture which is earth's and let's put it back to the normal earth cloud map so it looks you know correct there we go we got some earth clouds and add in our atmosphere here we go we got a nice blue shining atmosphere maybe a little bit too much atmosphere we move things to the right remember it makes it less less atmosphere let's add some texture to this atmosphere layer to make it more um interesting looking so i'm going to make this like a poison looking you know this is where we're heading basically in the future okay so we got that now let's mix in let's use mix rgb to mix some most grape texture into this atmosphere so shift a moose grave shift a rgb which is the mix rgb or there it is and we're going to mix it with this right here put your mousse grave in the bottom color number two put it into multiply and let's do the similar settings that we did earlier which is 16 detail zero dimension there we go we've already got this really pretty looking thing let's add more atmosphere to make it more visible there we go so instead of it being a smooth circle gradient of atmosphere it's all blotchy and imperfect so if we go to zero smooth gradient all the way up though moose gray all over the place so you might not want all the way be somewhere in that in the middle that gives a nice it breaks up the perfect atmosphere just some more imperfection all right now let's say you want to make a gas giant probably the easiest kind of planet to make so select your surface let's open up a jupiter image now we want to get rid of our bumps so just put your strength to zero there's no bump on gas giant because it's all clouds all right now let's add a ring around it so make sure your cursor is in the middle you can do shift c now shift a and add a circle let's raise this to about 100 vertices s to scale the circle up and this circle is just an empty circle it's not even a mesh yet so go to tab and press the letter f to fill it so the circle is now a filled in circle which is the disk now press i for inset put it like that and delete that center face there we go we've got our ring now we need to add a texture to it so texture new name it ring shift a add an image texture now i happen to have an 8k image of saturn's rings right here i'm going to click open image connect it to base color right there this of course does not look right so let's expand and get our uv unwrapping editor right here tab a for all u and unwrap now i don't see anything here oh there they are there has rings i don't want them to be rings i want them to be a straight so let's go to uv and let's try uvs to grid as squares didn't do anything oh because we have to turn off the sync button right again uv i have to select them all uv grid squares there we go now they're all squares next to each other that's perfect but i'm not sure which direction they're going so let's select one and then the one next to it they're going this way so we need to rotate this by 90 degrees so a for all r90 now s x to scale along the x-axis look at that it's already coming into the the view there looks sweet now this scaling doesn't really matter because this image is just gradient lines basically rather the same so that looks great now it's not to scale you know astronomical scale i don't really care about that right now um so but that's good enough for me now this image actually has alpha this is a png with an alpha channel which is great because the rings are not you know solid you can see through them a little bit um they are just pieces of ice after all so select the ring get rid of our uv editor and we actually have an alpha channel so let's do that shift a mix shader here shift a transparent plug that into shader number two and then use the alpha channel right there ah look at that semi-transparent rings that's great now i need to align them with the uh you know the shape of the plant the orientation of the planet i'm going to press number three rr to kind of dip them go to different side views that gets it there we go now it's going along with the planet you can make them smaller by going into tab edge select and then alt click the outer edge and just scale it in you can make it really narrow you make a huge you know super saturn kind of thing lots of possibilities and you can just make a gradient to make this texture you can find all kinds of you know textures to use as a ring just have fun with that all right one last thing is i'm going to show you how to add some glowing portions to add some sci-fi you know creepy element to a planet so i'm going to open up a really rocky surface let's just use the um i'm going to grab this one because it has some really dark portions and i want these portions and these lines which are really beautiful to glow so let's clean her up let's clean up our nodes a little bit we don't really care about the ocean trick bump we can put that back up to like point two point three give it some some scratchiness this is a not nice planet now we're going to move this material output over because we need room for a mix shader and then also in emissions so emissions is going to go into slot number two now we're mixing between normal planet and emissions we're going to make a mask out of this texture to tell it what's going to glow and what's not so shift a color ramp plug in color to there and then color output to factor all right so let's make this color just red really red and turn it up to like three pretty bright now when we play with this color ramp let's see if i can go into material mode to make this a little bit quicker it doesn't look as pretty you'll get the point as i play with this color ramp i can basically select what errors are going to glow and what's not so let's try this side i don't want that i want the opposite we can reverse the gradient to get you know the opposite effect there we go that's getting closer to what i wanted maybe we change the gradient type that'll make it a little bit smoother put it as cardinal and um let's go back into render view cool so we've got glowing pieces like lava and then non-glowing pieces this glowing these glowing pieces are a little bit boring so we can spice them up by adding some variation with a moose grave texture so shift a moose grave shift a color ramp because we need to give it some color put that there color into color and now when the moose grave looks terrible let's size it like way up detail up dimension maybe point one there we go and now we can we need to make this black you know red and then the white we have uh you know we can do color gradients now you do the red orange red to yellow whatever you want to do cool maybe make it more of a subtle thing there awesome so see what we did is we're mixing between a planet surface shader which is this with an image and the emissions which the color of the emissions is from a colorized muscular texture you can control the brightness of that but i like you know 3 and up 10 might be a bit much if you have your glow turned on in your render it'll look really cool and of course when you render this even though there's shadow on the planet the emissions will still glow you can use that for cities lava lightning storms whatever you want well i think that is about it for the basics i could probably do a part two advanced planet tutorial for more things like volumetrics and more advanced procedural stuff um i'll i'll see how the reception is in this video and i may or may not do a part two well that's it thanks for watching i hope you had fun following this tutorial if you have a planet render that you're proud of send it to my email down below i'd love to see what you guys make maybe i'll show it on a future video that will be cool i don't know uh but i hope you followed along and be sure to subscribe to this channel so i know that you guys like this type of video and i'll make more of them thanks for watching hope you're here again soon

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 88,724

Keywords: scifi art, planets, make planets, planet textures, nodes, blender tutorial, beginner blender, CGI, space

Id: 6224Wisxwxc

Length: 40min 22sec (2422 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021