Planetary Clouds

[ben_hamburg]

hi there,

I am trying to animate a realistic shot of earth from space. the biggest challenge is getting teh volumetric look of the clouds right. I was thinking of using phoenix FD for that, but after a little R&D I feel that is either impossible or at least a little overkill...

So I tried another approach with opacity mapped clouds with some displacement and a sss Material.

Here is what I got so far, after a little compositing:



And here are some reference images:





Improvement-Ideas I got so far:

-Painting the displacement in Zbrush (right now I´m only using the opacity map with a turbulent noise layer on top).
-Adding more cloud layers in different heights.
-Adding some cloud layers without sss material and displacement for the wispier clouds
-depending on how close I´ll get to the clouds, maybe even add a couple of hand sculped clouds in aswell ( like those tower-like structures in the first reference image

I´m not sure about:

-How to get better shadows. Partly I´ll probably have to experiment with the position and size of the vraysun, maybe change the opacity of the atmospheric layer (below the clouds, with a blue falloff map), so it catches some of the shadows.
-How to eliminate the gap at the edge of the earth. I made the sphere with the cloud maps a little bigger than the earth sphere, because I wanted the shadows to be more prononounced, but now there is a gap between the two.
Maybe I could just add another opacity map on top of the cloud layer to simply make the edges of the cloud layer close to the earths edge transparent.
-Who I could improve the shading of the cloud material.

[ben_hamburg]

Yeah, doing those already helped:

-Adding more cloud layers in different heights.
-Adding some cloud layers without sss material and displacement for the wispier clouds
-depending on how close I´ll get to the clouds, maybe even add a couple of hand sculped clouds in aswell ( like those tower-like structures in the first reference image

Here is a new WIP:



Its also became apparent that the shadowing wasn´t as pronounced as on the reference images, because the displacement was just very subtle. With the added cloud-objects, the shadows are way better visible.

the cloud objects don´t blend very well with the cloud layer below, but thats definitely something I could fix by takeing the whole cloud layer to Zbrush.