Open Hatch

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The green, ringed planet I rendered and posted last here had problems. Light didn’t shine through the rings as in photos of Saturn. After a lot of web searching I finally figured I’d search for tutorials on glass in 3D Studio Max, and was led to a solution – a translucency shader material instead of a blinn material, rendered with “radiosity”. The planet now also has striped shadows on the surface from the varying opacity of stripes in the rings – which you also see in photographs of Saturn. I added some orbiting gaseous moons. Here are new renders of the planet. One of these has fake “false color” like some NASA photos of planets I can send you very large versions (1680 x 1050) on request. Feel free to use this for any personal use; credit me me in any public use.

I can send you very large versions of these (1680×1050) on request. Some of these are from renders where I’d forgotten to make the planet oblong, and I stretched them in photoshop – a gas giant stretches from its own sheer centrifugal force produced by its enormous mass. The high “radiosity” render with an angle and lighting resembling this speechlessly gorgeous photograph of Saturn uses a lighting calculation setup I haven’t yet figured out how to get properly working; otherwise these might all have much subtler and alternately brighter lighting.

I also made a mouse-pad from one of these renders at my Zazzle online store (I’ll probably add more options for mousepads, and posters of this too). And I made a quick and dirty animation simulating a flyby. Emphasis on quick; this is a fun sketch. Here’s a link to it (I gave up trying to get them to embed in my blog page).

http://www.blog.openhatch.net/video/01_planet_b_flyby__rah_320x240.mov

There are other cool things you see with Saturn I’m still not doing. Future wish list for this planet: atmospheric light refraction/color shift when light travels through the atmosphere for a long length (as along the surface towards the night side of the planet). There are gorgeous pictures of Saturn with bright blue in the north atmosphere from this effect, doubly gorgeous because this bright blue is under striped shadows of the rings. I also want a bright corona atmosphere effect from light bending around the edge of the planet if you view it from the shadow side with the sun directly behind the planet – and a vast light corona refracted from dust far out beyond the rings, as seen from the same angle – both of these effects are seen in one picture of Saturn. I want to figure out how to get this radiosity lighting in Max working with translucency shaders and/or materials the way I want. I also may want to add dimensionality to the rings – they are just flat (which you see as they momentarily vanish in that animation). And.. some custom textured moons (I only added the ones in one of these pictures as an afterthought – wish they’d been there before). And.. an animation simulating tilt and rotation of the planet along with orbiting very distant twin dying giant suns.

But I’m happy with this for.. a while