Procedural Planets in Blender - TUTORIAL

hello there have you wanted to be a god and create planets with your bare hands well today we're gonna do that sort of in this tutorial we're gonna learn how to make procedurally generated planets in blender like this one so good hi there my name is william and let's get started so the first thing we need to do is create a sphere for our planet i will choose an icosphere with six subdivisions and shade smooth then we need to create a camera so we can see our planet in a render and i'll just reset the rotation there on alt r and then i will rotate it by 90 degrees i'll be doing a square render so i will set my render settings over here to 1080 by 1080. then we need a light and i'll make a sun place it over here and rotate it towards our sphere and to see the light i will go to material preview and i'll click the little tab here and turn on scene lights and i will also use the default hdri for now for look dabbing but i'll set the strength down to something like 0.1 just so it lights up the dark earth a little bit but the sun is doing most of the work uh the sun itself i find that values between 5 and 25 work the best when doing these planet shots so i think that's really what we need here and i think this is pretty good we might be a little bit too close with our camera because we also need to have some atmosphere that's going to cover our earth our planet and this looks good i'll also just rotate my sun a little bit so i can see that round perimeter there i think that is pretty good and that is it for our setup uh for this planet we the setup will work both in eevee and in cycles but some precautions in eevee you have to be a little bit careful with the resolution but you'll see that later when we get to the atmosphere specifically but now we're done here so we'll start getting into the material editing so we'll open a new panel here like so and switch this to the shader editor and we'll click enter over here to just view our ball um and i'll just turn off the overlays for now on this planet so we can see it nice and big like so over the material shader editor here we'll click our ball and then we'll make a new material and we'll dub this planet material there we go right so the first thing we're going to do to our planet is create the diffuse color right so the base color that just determines you know the separation between land and water for example we will not be making an earth-like planet we'll just make something kind of alien so to start off with since everything is procedural we're getting a noise and then something like a ramp and here we'll try to get the big shapes first right so look at the big shapes and maybe create some kind of continent-like structure so i'll just adjust the scale here a little bit find the details there and end from the roughness something like that and to get some additional organicness added to this i will take another noise take the color output of this and put it into the vector right and by the way when i'm viewing these nodes i'm clicking ctrl shift and then clicking and then that's using the node wrangler add-on which i highly recommend and you can see here using this extra noise inside this noise we get this quite interesting organic structure and if we change these a little bit we can really get some pretty interesting patterns here and we'll do we'll just see here and here we i'm not looking for something really specific i'm just playing around a little bit until i get something that i like and i quite like the shapes that are going on here but i want a little bit less darkness in these black areas so something like this yeah this is this is more like it then what i imagine now is that the white parts are these the landmasses and the blacks are more the ocean i think i want an additional texture though to kind of break up the patterns to get that the idea is to take a texture coordinate node another noise probably a fresh refresh one a noise texture there and a mapping node we'll take the generator output and the vector here and put it into the noise and then what i'll do is i will scale the bottom here and you can see we start getting these horizontal lines and also grab a color ramp just to amp everything up something like this a bit more scale here a bit more detail and a bit more roughness then we're getting these quite nice lines here and this we can use together with with our previous noise it's something like a mix rgb and then setting the mode to lighten i actually don't need to clamp it and then you can see they're kind of filling up those areas it's a bit too harsh right now so i will just make everything a bit darker just so it's the hint of these white lines here and i quite like the look of that and we'll leave it at that and to get a little bit more of an interesting result maybe we could rotate the planet around somewhere and find a good spot i quite like this area here how it looks there that's that's pretty nice i will leave it like that and this kind of suggests a pole of sorts because because of the rotations here very nice this then um is the base noise right and typically when i make these planets i create a base noise and i make all the other maps based on this base base noise and the first map we'll make is the color map so we'll just grab the color here or a color ramp and plug that into our principal bsdf here and then view this node and then here also not looking for something really specific i'll just plot in some colors and then start playing so the black here is not the reputation of these blanks so i'll do something like a greenish kind of blue ocean something like that just slight hint of green there that looks pretty nice and then i'll do something more audacity like that maybe something red here and then we can really play with the contrasts here and even choosing something like ease and playing with different falloff methods can give you different results something like that maybe a bit more the yellow here and then a little bit of white here and there that is quite nice overall this looks pretty good um it could do with a little bit more detail so i just go over to my noise here and just amp up the roughness a little bit there and amp up the roughness a little bit here and the detail for sure there we go yeah that looks that looks pretty nice let's go center it back and i think that's it for now for color we could do more but we can always come back to it the next thing we'll make is the separation in roughness right so if we look at our principal bsdf here we can see that um the color looks quite nice but this roughness right is just even so we'll create a roughness map based on our lighten thing here look at that and when we are far away from uh from the planet like this then everything starts becoming quite rough even the oceans and even though we have like water can be quite reflective when we're this far away waves and general you know surface tension and stuff will just make things rough so on this scale black is pretty much a mirror all right and white is completely rough so we just at least want to increase the black we don't have anything that is that reflective so we'll put that quite high up um but we still want variation in the roughness so we'll just plug our map in here um and to get that variation we can clamp these things together and we can really start getting a different feel for land mass and water right and this is the kind of thing we're looking for here something like this and then we can also again play with the the fall of type and maybe you get something that's a bit more desirable but this is really what i'm looking for here this especially that difference there this might be a bit too rough so i could bring that down a little bit just so i feel something like that that is pretty nice perfect i think that is good for now something else we need is a bump map from this distance we won't really see the individual heights of things but just an indication of height like very subtle indication can can work quite nicely so we'll grab another ramp node like that plug in our node here and then we'll grab a bump node put that into the height and into the normal and we'll see what we get here it's probably gonna be quite strong as the strength is set to one yeah there we go that is pretty strong much stronger than what we need we probably need to go further down uh you know this could work if you're doing something quite destructive but i have something a bit less destructive in mind so maybe even down to 0.025 yeah this is this is a lot closer to what i was thinking so we're feeling that slight bumpiness here and there but it's not too aggressive um it's enough for you to more feel it and then necessarily see it great um that is pretty much it for the color of our planet and we can always go in and adjust and we might have to once we start doing the clouds and the atmosphere so next step is doing the clouds to do the clouds we will grab our sphere here and just duplicate it and enlarge it right and that will become the sphere which which our clouds will sit upon so we'll go over to the material tab here remove the material that's on it and create a new one and call it our clouds material and we'll also just rename our spheres we have called this one planet and this one clouds there we go now with our clouds we're going to do a transparent setup so we'll create a mix shader and a transparent shader and mix these two together and basically now anything that is black uh will be transparent anything that's white is uh solid right so we can use that to create our clouds so we'll create a noise texture and a ramp we plug that into our ramp and plug that into our factor here and see what we get here exactly but we don't see through it why is that maybe we could check in cycles just to see if it's the same there and no there it's actually transparent so why is it not transparent evie that is because over in the material tab here a special setting has to be set we have to switch to ev for that to be available so we go into the settings and you can see your cloud material settings then this setting here blend mode set to opaque needs to be set to alpha blend and now we get that see-through idea there right but the shadow that's being cast is still as if though the whole thing was a sphere it's not considering the outline of the clouds so for that we have to set the shadow mode to alpha hashed and then we can start getting these cloudish shadows right the clouds are a little bit too big now so we'll bring them closer to the surface and then if we just really crank up the density here then we should start seeing some shadows but we're not really seeing very clear shadows and that is also because in eevee some settings with the sun so if i click the sun here then underneath bias and the max distance you can see if i close the bias in here you start seeing that shadow popping up there right the bias up buys down we start seeing that shadow and right now the max distance is 200 so it's not really giving us a lot of space i'll set it closer to something like 20 and usually gives you a bit higher resolution also under settings in ev shadows you can set the resolution of your shadow sizes to something a bit higher right cool back to our clouds now we have this kind of marshmallowy cloud so we'll just amp up the thesis a little bit and the roughness a bit and everything starts looking a bit more like clouds and a bit more see through here maybe and we definitely could just bring everything out a little bit just to get that hint of shadow here and there very nice um the one thing with these clouds is that they look quite just like noise and they don't really have that traditional kind of flowy cloud shape like usually clouds have a sense of direction a waviness and but if we give it a little bit of distortion i think it emulates that feeling of clouds waving in the sky like this and then maybe just amping up the it almost looks like clouds moving now when we're adding the scale like this which i quite like um just sometimes it doesn't look completely right but just play with it a little bit until you get something that that is somewhat close like that and then i will just make it a bit less here and a bit more soft there then maybe i will set the fall of type to something like ease i think that's pretty good something like that maybe a bit smaller here yep that is pretty nice uh okay that is it for the clouds for now we might have to come back to them when we do our atmosphere but for now this is good we'll grab our clouds and to create our atmosphere it's a little bit different we still need a sphere but we'll make it a little bit bigger so it's around there and then we'll go to a material tab delete the material and call this one atmos and create a new material called atmos material so the atmosphere is a little bit different because we're not going to be using just a flat texture right we're going to use a volume so what we need in here is another principle bsdf but something like a volume scatter node and that one we can plug into the volume and then we have it there and we're like hmm it's it's square and if we go to cycles and check we just need to switch to cycles here if we go to cycles and check it's round what's going on there so in ev because of some performance limitations this this shape of a volume can only be defined by the density so we have to recreate a sphere for the density within the nodes here and luckily there is a method for that so not really a big problem what we do is we create a texture coordinate and a mapping node and a gradient texture we'll plug these two things together there and there and then we'll set this to spherical and we have to actually use the object thing here and we plug this into our density and now you see if we hide the planet and the clouds it's actually a round sphere there now right so that's it's a little bit different and just be aware of that you would have to do that anyways if you're um if you're if we're just rendering in cycles because we're going to be ramping these values to get a specific atmospheric horizon line right but just you know that if you're experiencing this in ebit this is the reason okay very nice um added to this we're gonna grab a ramp node and a math node to control the strength a little bit so it says it's multiply and then we just set it to something like 5. we'll add the planet back in and then we'll zoom in a little bit and what we're looking for is some kind of fall off where it's quite bright right along the surface and then it tapers out it already does that a little bit but we want to control that area a bit more so on our ramp the black part represents the outer edge the white part represents the core essentially but we're going to bring that up around here and we could do that just by moving it you can see it's already getting a lot brighter and also bright out here so i will change the falloff type to ease that brings that in a little bit and then i will just bring in our atmosphere a little bit like this right and depending on what kind of planet you have you don't want the atmosphere to be too thick i definitely want mine to be a bit smaller and i will even just scale down the model itself a little bit and this is looking pretty good to me so far now it's a little bit difficult to tell on eb here because the resolution is so poor but we can increase that resolution if we just set our render settings here to eb and then go into volumetrics then essentially the start and the end properties they define the stretched resolution of of volumes right and because we're working with only within a few meters then we could set this to something like six and then you can see it really clamps those things in we set the tile size to two that really smoothes it out and then amp up the samples to something like 256 right and you see that really takes care of a lot there and then we can play a bit with the distribution here and maybe find a place where the lines are less affected and there almost takes care of all the lines there so that is pretty nice we could also bring this in a little bit so that is quite nice very nice all right um the next thing here is we'll take a look at the color of our atmosphere so we'll grab the color here and we'll make it something bluish right a very classic kind of planety look we'll turn off our clouds just to see what that's like very nice and then maybe we can just adjust the density a little bit it's a little bit harsh right now that's a bit nicer seeing a bit more of the planet there and then i will just play with the falloff here a little bit and you see now we have it in ev we also have it in cycles cycles rendered there quite nicely and maybe there is not the perfect translation between the atmospheric thickness in cycles and eevee so just be aware of that that when you're look diving then it might look different but i think it's starting to look pretty nice i'll just grab my sun increase the value a little bit maybe a bit too much here 6.5 maybe yeah something like that and otherwise that is our planet and we are ready for a [Music] render there you have it how to make procedurally generated planets in blender i hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you want to know more about creating procedurally generated planets in blender then you can check out an extended tutorial i made over on gumroad there we'll look at how to make something earth-like lava planets city planets and how to do advanced clouds and a little bit about finalizing and compositing your planets so go check that out link in the description below if you like this video give it a like if you want to see more from us then follow us on our youtube channel and various social media all can be found in the description below thanks for now and bye

Channel: Critical Giants

Views: 49,085

Keywords: tutorial, concept art, blender, howto, visual development, concept, art, critical, eevee, cycles, learn, design, 3d, visdev, planet, procedural, shading, texturing, cg, lighting, rendering

Id: TbrbF38_wUg

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/william_bang]

Based on the huge response from this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/mc273d/i_make_procedural_planets_in_blender_anyone/

I decided to make a tutorial on youtube to share with you y'all, and if you are really interested in the subject then you can checkout the extended tutorial on my gumroad: https://gumroad.com/l/PGPIB

Enjoy!

[u/yerguyfanfan]

he made it!

[u/C_DRX]

Thank you !

[u/stedic]

I bow to your awesomeness!

[u/sargentpilcher]

AMAZING!

[u/3dforlife]

You're the man!

[u/Catastrio]

I'm thinking about buying your full tutorial but it doesn't look like the Earth like planet has mountains. Is that possible with your technique?

[u/lixuser]

Man, thank you so much.
You are an artist.

[u/tensigh]

This was really cool. Way above my level but maybe I'll come back to it. I'm a total noob, thought this might be a good way to get started.