planetary atmosphere challenge.

[super gnu]

maybe for some reason the shelling has an effect.. not sure why it should... i must revisit the scattervolume option.

[fixeighted]

Seems to work though...here's an example of both, using the same shader.
Interestingly you can see the effect of the phase shift.

[fixeighted]

And on the subject of clouds, you got me thinking when you mentioned the FastSSS version you did (which I'd love to see) and so thought to give it a try.
Whilst yes, this is comically wrong, it it is just an initial test and does offer a rather nice level of detail from practically zero effort.
All it is is one quick rough cloud model piped though Forest (Chaos Scatter failed at the same task btw) with a probability curve controlling z scale
and mapped to the existing cloud map.
So much detail that just isn't doable with any easily created displacement.
I did make a SSS shader but this is scattervolume again, which looks much nicer in comparison, even down to the scatter SSS grey colour suggesting storm clouds on the thinner bits.

Brilliantly fun couple of days toying with all this, all of which I haven't really tried before, so nice one for starting the topic again

[super gnu]

that has potential, definitely agree with you on the detail.. however the variety of different cloud types is problematic.. id lean more towards some texture based way to break up a volumetric material rather than scattered geometry, but the more things are tried the better.. ..


here is a hig res crop of where i currently am with mine... clouds have too much blue/green in them, and the colour shift is too heavy.. this is still with a fake atmosphere.

i created an insanely subdivided geosphere, shelled it at zero thickness, then put a max displace on the outer shell with my cloud map to get the volumetric meshes for the clouds. took my filesize from 500 meg to 8GB so i proxied it out.











now playing with volumetric atmosphere again, but ive immediately got a hard edge on my scattervolume atmosphere again, even with scatter radius at a million. no idea why mine doesnt work and yours does.



ive actually had more success with sss2 for the atmosphere as well... seems to work better with mapping... for example i can map the opacity with a falloff map to fade out the edges and centre... plus mapping the colour components seems more predictable too. cant do that with scattervolume. not physically correct though, and doesnt behave well when backlit, unless i set it to "raytraced, solid" and then it just behaves super wierdly.

[Paul Oblomov]

I remember, that we just need osl support for volumetric. And that will do the magic, since theres a lot were done for blender already. Or maybe use h.

[super gnu]

yes i have a feeling you are right. to get anything approaching realistic it would have to be a custom shader of some kind. i doubt we can get close just by "choosing the right sss colour"

[fixeighted]

I did a closer version to see what was happening at that level and I am happy with the approach for the clouds....naturally more variations in models will make for a better outcome
but as a 'proof of concept' I reckon it looks pretty workable, albeit madly scaled. I'll tweak to fit, with more variation...
I meant to add earlier that I am using a filmic for the output which deals somewhat with the falloff...anyway, try this map and see if works for you.

I'm tired of looking at it for now, so will review in a day

[fixeighted]

I woke with an urge to retry from scratch, knowing what I know now.
So this is actually a little different, using a whole sphere for the volume and tweaking it
to get what is expected, using that same basic falloff map.
Running with your idea of sss clouds, these are just displaced onto another sphere.
I need a better map but this is adequate for testing.
Lighting is swapped to a sphere/light material.
What I'm pleased with is the render time of 10 mins at 4k, of just 2 passes with 0.01 noise, using the intel denoiser,
which it turns out does a massively quicker and better job than the default Vray one for this scene.

I have a sequence showing full traversal, to see whether people reckon the lighting works, but that'll take a while...

[damaggio]

I did one last month with night and day changing when rotating the earth.The film was put on hold so I had to leave it unfinished.Should lower the clouds a bit more next time.

[fixeighted]

I of course ended up with spaceships...gotta have some fun amongst all the brain work and pixel-musing

Having spent a good deal of time on this, I reckon I'd have to opt for this basic method; SSS for the atmosphere, purely
because it renders so quickly and has the option of mapped opacity. The rest of it...the terminator shift and whatever else can be hacks.
Scattervolume is a render time-sink, so however nice it's pointless but for stills and still a pain to set up.
It's a shame because as was noted, you lose the cool atmosphere shadows from the volume.
Based on that alone, it seems like a wishlist thing for some more options and a speed up to be looked at for the volume method
or more capability added to the sss method. As always, I'm no coder, so no have idea how feasible that is but they are both so tantalisingly close to the ideal solution.

I note that no dev types have commented on this thread as yet...that's probably because they are already hard at work on the fixes and upgrades

[super gnu]

so, did anyone manage to get something that looks nice with the sun peeping out from behind the earth? ill probably need to do some shots like that for the next project and ive not found something that works even remotely yet.


p.s. nice spaceships

[fixeighted]

the setup I had works fine I think...will up a pic when back later on tonight.

[fixeighted]

of the sun peeking I mean.
this site is annoying on mobile I just discovered...

[kosso_olli]

that has potential, definitely agree with you on the detail.. however the variety of different cloud types is problematic.. id lean more towards some texture based way to break up a volumetric material rather than scattered geometry, but the more things are tried the better.. ..


here is a hig res crop of where i currently am with mine... clouds have too much blue/green in them, and the colour shift is too heavy.. this is still with a fake atmosphere.

i created an insanely subdivided geosphere, shelled it at zero thickness, then put a max displace on the outer shell with my cloud map to get the volumetric meshes for the clouds. took my filesize from 500 meg to 8GB so i proxied it out.











now playing with volumetric atmosphere again, but ive immediately got a hard edge on my scattervolume atmosphere again, even with scatter radius at a million. no idea why mine doesnt work and yours does.



ive actually had more success with sss2 for the atmosphere as well... seems to work better with mapping... for example i can map the opacity with a falloff map to fade out the edges and centre... plus mapping the colour components seems more predictable too. cant do that with scattervolume. not physically correct though, and doesnt behave well when backlit, unless i set it to "raytraced, solid" and then it just behaves super wierdly.

Wow, this is looking insanely good!

[super gnu]

Wow, this is looking insanely good!

hey thanks! overall im pretty happy with it, but i really want to take it to the next level, and more importantly, i want it to look good, as mentioned, when the sun pops out from behind and the atmosphere is backlit and glows, plus all the volumetric and scattering goodness that a real atmosphere gives... with my setup im still quite limited in the shots i can do.. plus, of course, however high res the textures are, if you zoom in to the country level you rapidly run out of resolution.

im toying with the idea of using vraydecal to add high res patches when i need to zoom in, but ive not tried yet.

be nice if somebody made a "google maps" streaming texture plugin, apply the texture, and it streams the correct zoom level for how close you are.... that would be awesome, even if the quality on google maps isnt hugely consistent, with bands of different colour etc... however... the zoooooooom!