texturing a planet?

can anyone help me with info on texturing a planet on cinema? like how to do the clouds? just to make a good looking 3d planet. i can get images from the net and make my own .. plus the photoshop plu in lunar cell will do texture maps of planets, clouds , clouds bump maps, texture masks etc. but my question is once i creat a material in cinema how do i mix them all together to make a realistic looking planet? i hope someone can help? maybe make a tutorial?

cool thank you

Used TruEarth imagery for all the models






Mark Simpson

What's the best way to do a nice atmosphere (blue ring) effect in Cinema 4d?

I mean the blue-tinged ring of an atmosphere that encircles a planet. I've tried glow lights and texturing, but haven't had much luck.

In addition to Thorns idea which sounds like an interesting approach, I did this using a larger sphere with reduced visibility, and the BhodiNUT 'Banji' shader, set up so that a blue reflection is visible only on the edges. It gets a good part of the way there.

Mark Simpson

Too bad the gradient shader doesn't do a spherical gradient. in 3dsmax, that's how I'd do it. But I'd rather not use max.

Well, it does, sort of. If you use the BhodiNUT Gradient shader, you can get a radial gradient, which can be positioned carefully on a seperate sphere. Then any animation would be applied to the earth/cloud shperes within that sphere, with the external atmosphere remaining stationary.

I played with that some as one half of a fusion shader in the alpha channel of a translucent blue shader (3D noise applied to the base channel) to try and create a circle that was blue around the edges only fading into and out out of visibility. This was difficult to get right, but with enough effort might produce pleasing results.

I'm thinking it might be better/easier to add this effect in Post using AE.

Below is another attemp using a combination of Thorns idea (very subtle as I was having a bit of trouble with it, need more time to experiment), and my Banji shader idea (this time with refraction reduced to '1' so that I again can have three visible layers; earth, clouds, and atmosphere)

Mark Simpson