Gas Giants

[Spartan-117]

I'm working slowly on a big ass gas giant along with three large moons and rings that will consist of a 2D rings face and also 3D rocks/asteroids for an animation. I still haven't decided for a final texture for the gas giant. Thought I might try and make it animated but I haven't got a clue how to do that AND make it look remotely convincing.

I made these three gas giants today using photoshop, applied to a sphere with an atmosphere. Rendered in Bryce 7, took my brand spanking new iMac 1 hour and 13 mins :td: :wtf:

Would love some comments... and if anyone likes them then feel free to use them for anything you want. :)

[Rigel]

Lovely!

[Starbase1]

Very nice, credible colouring which is not much like any real planet, a tricky thing to pull off!

Minor crits:

You seem to have a little specular added, which makes them look a bit like wood.
Not sure how you do it in bryce, but the falloff to the terminator is somewhat too soft to be realistic,
Something a little bit more twirly in the displacements would be a bit more realistic too I think.
But still pretty darn impressive!

I look forward to seeing the rings.
Nick

[Gordon Robb]

Nice

[Amras]

Nice work.
But I agree with the critic points of Starbase. :)

[3D_CG]

oh
i thought it was gas gas ....

:)

Nice renders :)

[BillS]

I think I like the first one most of all.

[Spartan-117]

Very nice, credible colouring which is not much like any real planet, a tricky thing to pull off!

Minor crits:

You seem to have a little specular added, which makes them look a bit like wood.
Not sure how you do it in bryce, but the falloff to the terminator is somewhat too soft to be realistic,
Something a little bit more twirly in the displacements would be a bit more realistic too I think.
But still pretty darn impressive!

I look forward to seeing the rings.
Nick

Thanks :) I used a Hubble image of a random nebula for the base, then simply cut a 1 pix wide strip from that, made it the right width and distorted the heck out of it. Only did some minor color correction. have tried doing it from scratch but when it comes to coloring nothing beats mother nature.

I did add a bit of a specular, mostly for artistic purposes.

The terminator softness is something you can't change, as far as I know at least. I have used the program for years and I have tried all sorts of different light sources and what not. But there's no setting for it or anything :(

I found it a tad difficult to get the right look for random twirls. Mostly since they can't look too uniform.

Here are a few new renders, rings included ;) was going to post them earlier but I spent most of my friday in the E.R. and been resting since. Well mostly anyway. Also posting a reference image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Since the image shows Saturn with a very soft falloff. In any case I'm not aiming for photo realistic because that is far too difficult. I'm settling for "semi-realistic" hehe.


oh
i thought it was gas gas ....

:)

Nice renders :)

Thank you :)
"gas gas" is called Petrol or possibly Gasoline ;) oh you yanks and your "gas" :p LOL

[Amras]

I think the red planet is a bit too saturated to but the others are looking great.

[Starbase1]

ER? All recovered now I hope?

As for the sampling, I used a single pixel slice of a desert from orbit one time, applied to a ring system... it all works!

Can you use cylindrical texture maps in your software?

The reason I ask is that ring maps need to be horribly huge if you do them the direct way. What I do in lightwave is start with a zero thickness washer shaped ring system, then lift the inner edge up a very small distance, so what you have is in effect a truncated cone that is very nearly flat. If you can then apply a cylinder mapped texture along the vetical axis, (such as one of your 1 pixel slices), you can easily get thousands of samples in your ring system which have effectively been spun around the planet.

Repeat with an offset for the transparency channel, and you will have a hugley detailed ring system for very low effert.

[Spartan-117]

I think the red planet is a bit too saturated to but the others are looking great.

lol yeah :p I totally agree. Made that one before the others actually.

ER? All recovered now I hope?

99%... I have had a faint burning sensation on my left side of my rib cage for about two weeks. Friday morning it got worse and my whole chest started burning, very very intense and fairly painful. After a few hours it intensified and also moved up to my shoulder area and then up my neck. All meanwhile I was checking the net, googling my symptoms. Then I also a got this heavy pressure across my chest. That's when I went to the ER. They took a crap load of blood work, EKG and what-not. Turns out it was something called "reflux", like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gast :(roesophageal_reflux_disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastroesophageal_reflux_disease)

Not life threatening, but it certainly felt like it at the time.


Can you use cylindrical texture maps in your software?

The reason I ask is that ring maps need to be horribly huge if you do them the direct way. What I do in lightwave is start with a zero thickness washer shaped ring system, then lift the inner edge up a very small distance, so what you have is in effect a truncated cone that is very nearly flat. If you can then apply a cylinder mapped texture along the vetical axis, (such as one of your 1 pixel slices), you can easily get thousands of samples in your ring system which have effectively been spun around the planet.

Repeat with an offset for the transparency channel, and you will have a hugley detailed ring system for very low effert.

Yes I can. The "rings" is actually a flat cylinder surface which I made a hole in. See attached images. and the texture is only 64x915, spun around. I was going to use the flat cylinder face for all the far-away shots and with closeups I would use a shit load of low poly rocks close to the camera for the "asteroid rings", plus the flat version too. Probably render it separately and composite it all together in After Effects. :)


Oh and as for render times... the HUGE non-anti aliased I posted earlier took about 20 seconds to render, where as the other red one took about 40 mins. The render times in Bryce seem pretty random to be honest.

[Kerem]

This is supercool!

[JackN]

May I suggest some layering to get the color features to pop and have depth?

What I am suggesting is not unlike the cloud maps these guys use for Earth around here so that they get shadows cast and depth to the cloud layers. :)

Would require a couple more sphere's and some transparency.

[Luhiss]

I'm seeing a specular highlight.. although it is very diffuse. I'm thinking gas giants aren't shiny....

Other than that... looking nice.

[Treybor]

These are really nice Spartan!

[3D_CG]

So we calling them "Reflux Giants" now ???

Sorry had to do it .... :) us yanks and gas thing ... :)

Looking good mate..Bryce what version u using ???

:)

[Starbase1]

I'm seeing a specular highlight.. although it is very diffuse. I'm thinking gas giants aren't shiny....

Other than that... looking nice.

You might be surprised - though not obvious, (and I'm not at all sure in the case of Jupiter), there is often a brightening in the correct place - only really obvious with an animation.

And an abundance of high altitude ice particles provides a simple mechanism.

[Techno]

These are really nice.

The fourth Saturn ring pic is like something from Cassini.

I feel you with the imac Spartan, mine's not old & it struggles on large photoshop files etc. It's really just a notebook processor/board with a huge screen afterall.

[JackN]

The fourth Saturn ring pic is like something from Cassini.

Probably why he posted this in the same message... ;) :p

Also posting a reference image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Since the image shows Saturn with a very soft falloff.

[starship]

Looks very good! I just need to get a freetime and try it in 3ds max. :D

[farco]

wow cool ! :eek:

Have you a particular license for these surface maps, or are these like as Creative Common License or the like ? I would use them in my project (a free opensource game under GPLv3 license) for replace my old textures for some gas giants :tu:

[Spartan-117]

May I suggest some layering to get the color features to pop and have depth?

What I am suggesting is not unlike the cloud maps these guys use for Earth around here so that they get shadows cast and depth to the cloud layers. :)

Would require a couple more sphere's and some transparency.

I thought of that last year.. problem is getting the transparency in the right places, not to mention making it animated. I just a few weeks ago figured out a fairly simple way of animating a single textured gas giant using displacement mapping in After Effects :)


These are really nice Spartan!

Thanks :)


So we calling them "Reflux Giants" now ???

Sorry had to do it .... :) us yanks and gas thing ... :)

Looking good mate..Bryce what version u using ???

:)

Mostly 5 and 6.3, tested 7 but it has some major issues with importing models and unexpected crashes.

Probably why he posted this in the same message... ;) :p

Probably :p

wow cool ! :eek:

Have you a particular license for these surface maps, or are these like as Creative Common License or the like ? I would use them in my project (a free opensource game under GPLv3 license) for replace my old textures for some gas giants :tu:

Feel free to use them, also feel free to post a link for the game ;)

[farco]

Feel free to use them, also feel free to post a link for the game ;)

Cool ! thank you !!!

The dev blog link is in my sig, the game is far to be complete for the first phase of it but i think until max feb/march 2012 it will.

and the Sourceforge project page is here http://sourceforge.net/projects/farcolony/

[Starbase1]

I've taken one of the maps, done a hue shift to make it green, and used PSE's liquify to add spots and spiral storms. The results of the render are over in my Zagros 7 thread:

http://www.foundation3d.com/forums/showthread.php?p=199444#post199444

I attach the map to this message, in case others want to play with it:

[Spartan-117]

Nice one starbase, but the texture is looking a bit "sea sick", or "green" if you will hehe

Here's my first animated texture. Simple gas giant, which I know is too round but this is just to showcase the displacement and bumping. I had a hunch this would work out great in After Effects and I think I was right :)

720p Quicktime file, standard h.264 codec