3DFictional Gas Giant and Moons

sorceress21

Description (Fictional – Part of my original scifi universe):

This is the Charas planetary System located within the Epsilion Indis Minor star system, (Kepler-44 in the Earth catalogue.) The system is home to the moon of Aquella, the homeworld of the Aquellan Republic.

Pictured here is Charas (the primary) a Class VI gas giant and three of its largest moons. Arcathia, Pyros and Aquella. In the foreground is the 4th moon of Charas called Arcathia, the 1st moon Pyros (center right) and the 3rd moon Aquella (top right). There is one other major moon called Nakate out of frame as well as more than 30 other minor moons orbiting farther out. Most less than 20 kilometers across making them barely visible.

While it appears to be a habitable and inviting world, unlike the paradise of its sister moon Aquella, Arcathia’s atmosphere has high levels of methane, and carbon dioxide. Additionally, moderate levels of sulfur dioxide are present making the atmosphere not only toxic to humans but slightly caustic. While gravity, atmospheric pressure and temperature make wearing a full environmental suit unnecessary for short term exposure on Arcathia a full face sealed PBE for respiration is required. Arcathia has a weak magnetosphere thus surface exposure is also limited due to high levels of radiation present its surface. Due to the dangerous environment there is no civilian presence on Arcathia. There are however an undisclosed number of RADF military facilities on the moon.

Image Details:

This is fully 3D. All bodies including the rings are hard surface modeled, scaled appropriately and positioned as they would be IRL. The gas giant is a “tweaked” NASA image of Jupiter. The Arcathia texture map is also a NASA map of our moon I “habitalized.” Too far away to see clearly the Pyros texture is the unedited Moon map and the Aquella textures except for the cloud map were created by me in Gimp 2.0 from scratch.

In general, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. The one thing I don’t like is that I have not been able to create an atmosphere effect around the planets with Thea Studio that attenuates from the surface up like a real atmosphere does. If you zoom in close to the moon especially, you’ll see the atmosphere band is solid and doesn’t fade out with altitude. This is frankly pissing me off. There HAS to be a way to get that effect but I as of yet have not been able to discover how to pull it off in Thea. I achieved the atmosphere effect by surrounding the sphere with a slightly larger transparent sphere then assigning it as a container for a fog medium that I adjusted to get the right amount of haze. There doesn’t appear to be a way to get that medium to attenuate in a specific direction. There’s probably some way to get an atmosphere effect to come out right so my experimentation will be ongoing. Any suggestions on that front will be appreciated.