Now You Can Make Beautiful Planets in Blender!

hey everyone my name is christopher fraser from fraserfx.com and today we're going to be looking at how to create this beautiful planet effect inside of blender it is highly realistic and physically accurate and it's pretty straightforward to set up in addition i'm going to be showing you some of the best planet textures on the internet and how you can get your hands on them right now so stay tuned for that but without further ado let's get started in our blender scene here our brand new blender scene we're just going to go ahead and delete everything and i'm going to start off by adding a uv sphere now an important thing about when we create this is that we want to bring the segments and the rings up by a lot i'll set the segments to 128 and then your rings to half of whatever your segments are so in this case 64. so we've set our segments to 128 and our rings to 64. the reason why we've done this instead of just adding a subdivision surface modifier is when you add the subsurf modifier you can get some uv stretching on the poles and it looks pretty ugly and we don't want that so just by setting up those segments in the beginning we're setting ourselves up for better success next we will right click and shade smooth and we can get to work i'll go into rendered view and i've already got the sky texture set up but i want to delete that because we are in space set your exposure to about negative 4.5 and then add in a sunlight and we can rotate this and set the strength to match the real life intensity of the real sun set it to 175. that's about what you want the value to be i've done a lot of math on this trust me and to get our planet set up we'll just open up a panel here on the side go to the shader editor close this panel by hitting n and create a new material now you can use a number of different types of assets for this but i'm going to be using some of the textures from the brand new planet textures volume 2 that you can buy on fraserfx.com this is a collection of high quality 6k planet textures these textures come in a variety of different categories including alien craters desert gas giants ice lava red planet snow terra wasteland and water and there are some additional texture types like rings miscellaneous planet maps clouds and suns and these are all going to be super helpful for creating our planet scene here today so i'm just going to pick one that i like in this case i think we will go for the red planet type and i'll just drag in our textures here the cool thing about these textures is that they are based on real life planet textures scans of real planets so you can see that they've got a really nice realistic quality to them i'll just drag in my roughness map make sure that it's set to non-colored data bring in our normal map set that to non-color data as well and then just add the normal map node to complete it now that is the basic surface of our planet all completed but if you want to go a step further you can use the included displacement map now if we also set this to non-color we can use a displacement node by plugging our color into the height here and the displacement into the output go to material settings under settings change the displacement to displacement only now that seems wow that is i really did this in uh let's change the scale to something like .01 and then maybe we will add a subdivision surface modifier after all if you look at the top you can see that some of that texture stretching is pretty bad but if we angle it just right it shouldn't be too big of a problem if you want to you can change the feature set to experimental and back under the modifiers tab click adaptive subdivision this is going to give us some more fidelity to our model when it is applying the subdivision based on how close you are to it we can see that we're getting some really nice dimension there i'm going to go ahead and change maybe the scale of the displacement a little bit more and change the dicing scale to be a little bit smaller for our viewport rendering and that looks pretty nice actually i can set that back up to say one so it'll be one pixel for the final render but for now that's looking good next we need a nice layer of clouds so we're just gonna go ahead and take this sphere and duplicate it and then we'll just right click to reset the transform make sure to remove the subdivision modifier and just scale this up ever so slightly next we'll take our material rename surface and duplicate it by clicking this number two and we're going to call this clouds now i actually want to delete pretty much everything here we're going to go back and we're going to take in a clouds texture i'm going to take clouds 4 from the planet textures and we're actually going to plug this into the into the alpha channel and you'll see what this is going to do is this is going to create some very basic clouds now they don't look very great at the moment and that's because we need to do a little bit more work on our shader here we'll actually go to our base sphere turn off subdivision just for now maybe we'll take our clouds scale them up a little bit more so this is looking okay but it's really not looking all that great actually so what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and add in a gamma node right before the alpha we can set this to something like say 0.5 and you can see that this is going to thicken up the clouds a little bit we're also going to go ahead and add in a bump node and plug this in and if we just ctrl shift left click with node wrangler enabled we can bring the distance way way down maybe .005 and get ourselves a nice bump map for these clouds that's starting to look pretty sweet and they're looking a lot more nicely cloud-like but i want to take this a little bit more towards geonosis from star wars so what i'm going to do here is i'm actually going to take the clouds color i'm going to keep it bright but i'm going to bring it a little bit more towards yellow and that's just going to help to integrate it a little bit more with sort of the look that we have for our planet here and that's looking okay don't worry about this weird halo around the planet for now we're going to get to that a little bit later but for now this is looking pretty decent what i think we want to do though to add a little bit more depth is maybe we can take our planets or our clouds here scale them down just a touch and set the gamma back to one then we're going to duplicate our sphere scale it up ever so slightly and then press r r and then just move our mouse randomly to get a random rotation for that second sphere this is going to create another layer of depth to our clouds and it's going to add another layer of shadow to our clouds as well next we'll just duplicate the clouds one more time right click to cancel the transform r move it around scale it up ever so slightly and that's given us a couple of different layers to work with now right now the clouds i think are looking pretty decent but we're still missing something very important and that is the atmosphere to our planet so what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go to our original sphere once again we're going to duplicate it again right click to cancel scale it up a little bit until it's bigger than all of our clouds and our planet and then go just a little bit bigger we'll remove the subdivision surface modifier again and duplicate this material one more time and call this atmosphere now we're going to delete everything that we have here and we're going to add in a principled volume shader plug this into the volume what we actually want to do for the color is we're going to use a black body node we're going to set this to something like 15 000 or i think that's 150 000 plug that into the color and this is going to give us somewhat of an accurate representation of an atmosphere but we're not there yet what you may notice is we've got this weird thick halo around the whole planet but we want it to be more of like a glow sort of a gradient so to achieve that effect we're just going to add in a gradient texture set it to spherical and ctrl shift left click to preview we can also with node wrangler enabled hit control t to add in a texture coordinate and mapping node automatically and we'll just take our location and bring it into the negatives to about negative 0.5 in fact we're going to bring it back to exactly negative 0.5 and what we're just going to do here is add in a color ramp after the fact and this is going to be our density now we can do is we can set this to constant and we can just move this around until we find the values that we're looking for so we want to just bring this until we find sort of the outside of that glow in this case about 0.494 so we want to select the black handle and change the position to 0.494 maybe even 0.4935 then we want to take our white handle and move it just back a little bit until the atmosphere disappears 0.508 should do the trick maybe we'll even go a little bit farther 0.509 0.51 0.51 we've got 0.493 and 0.51 and we'll change that to linear it still doesn't quite look like what we want like the result we want so we're going to add in another color ramp so we can get even more specific so again we'll do the same thing with our constant values go to about i said about there we'll just copy that over and take our white handle move it back again until we just about don't have any left and we'll set that to linear now we can do is we can take something like a gamma node and bring up the gamma value to something like 5 and then follow that up with a math node set to multiply we can set that multiply value as about as high as we want we'll just zoom out here to see the whole planet until we get an adequate amount of atmosphere and now you're going to see that we've got this nice thick atmosphere here we've kind of eliminated that weird halo effect from earlier you can see that we're getting a nice a nice line along the terminator line here where it's turning a bit of a green orange color as it should and that sort of glow that fall off haze is nice and smooth which looks a lot like a real planet now i told you i was going for geonosis from star wars and the thing about geonosis is the sky isn't blue there it's actually yellow so what we want to do to get an accurate representation of a yellow sky is we could take the black body node and bring temperature down to something like 5500 but what i think we're going to do instead is add a hue saturation node that way by playing around with the hue value you can get whatever color sky you want so if you want a green sky for example you can set it that way and you can see that it behaves realistically over here by the terminator line you can see a little hint of purple because the sunset which would be right on that line would be purple which is nice and physically accurate so we can just set the value of this to say 1 and that's going to give us a nice orange yellow color for our sky you can even see if we look at it at an angle the reflection as though we're looking at it from the sunset is a little bit blue you can see if we invert it the reflection with a blue sky is a little bit yellow which is exactly what we want so this is working physically accurately so we've got a wonderful planet here with a physically accurate atmosphere some really pretty clouds and if we come in here and turn this subdivision modifier on some nice displacement what is the final layer of interest that we can add to a planet like this well geonosis for all my star wars fans out there has rings and luckily for us rings are included in the planet textures volume 2 pack you can find an example of a saturn ring texture on solar system scope which i will link down below but you can find a wider variety of rings from planet textures volume 2. so we will add a circle and under the add circle menu we will change the vertices to 128 just to smooth it out more and then we'll scale it up and we will tab into edit mode we're going to press e and then to avoid moving this around like that we're going to right click and then we're going to hit s to scale it down now this is exactly what we want if we hit a for all and split this view here we can set this to a uv image editor just to make sure that we're getting proper uvs which in this case we're not so if we just hit u and click reset we should have proper uvs for our rings but there's only one way to find out create a new material call it rings and drag in the ring texture of your choice let's try rings 10. we're going to plug this into the alpha channel and we've got ourselves some pretty nice looking rings if you want to invert the direction you can go into edit mode press a in the uv editor and press r 180 and then you can see that we've got essentially a flipped version of those rings these rings are looking pretty sweet but we're getting this weird blackout effect as we look through it here so what i think we're going to do is we're just going to go into our render tab here find our light paths and make sure that our transparent bounces are nice and high you might even need to set them up as high as 12 and now you can see that that looks a little bit more realistic but i'm not entirely happy yet with the coloring i want to add in something i want to add in a little bit of spice so the first thing we can do is we can add the color to the base color now that's going to create this sort of darkening effect where the dark parts are going to get even well darker so we'll just add in a mix rgb note and plug that texture into the factor then we can use this almost like an after effects tint effect and just change the two values until we get something a little bit more rocky looking there that's a little bit nicer but it still feels a little bit too smooth but i think what we'll do is we will add in a noise texture now what we can do because because of our uvs is if we hit ctrl t to add in these nodes we can plug in the uv texture coordinate into the vector and then change our x value to zero now you can see that we've got these randomized streaks all the way around the circle now all we need to do is bring the scale way down to get these little these fine little lines we're going to plug this into a separate mix texture and we'll just change this to some interesting colors we can even add an rgb curves node if we want to add in a little bit of manual contrast and then with a third mixed rgb node we can set this to a blend mode like overlay just to add a little bit more interest to those colors next we look at our final shader you're gonna see that we get some we get just a little bit more detail with those lines we can actually go even further with this effect if we change the detail all the way up and bring the roughness up you can see that the detail gets really minuscule we can make it subtler just by bringing bringing down the overlay value but but we're still going to see these nice fine lines which i think just helps to add a little bit of texture but it's not necessary certainly not for every scene next we can just take the rings rotate them a little bit and we've got ourselves a nice looking planet remember all of this is made possible by the brand new planet textures volume 2 pack from fraserfx.com so make sure to go to that link down in the description to pick up this pack for yourself but if you'd like a bit of a faster way to make nice looking planets you can go to this video tutorial right here to see how i used this free planet shader to create some amazing planets and only a minutes worth of time so go check that out if you're interested

Channel: Christopher Fraser

Views: 41,421

Keywords: blender, blender 3.0, blender 3d, blender beginner tutorial, blender planet, blender planet textures, blender planet tutorial, blender render, blender space, blender tutorial, blender3d, cycles, exoplanet, fraserfx, planet blender, planet crafter, planet in blender, planet textures, planet textures fraser fx, planet textures fraserfx, planet textures pack, planet textures vol. 2, shader, star wars blender tutorial, tutorial, tutorial planets, vfx, vfx textures, vfx tutorial

Id: 6jUlSgAevlg

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022