›

Greetings!

Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.

Sign In Register

Quick Links

Light Scattering on a planet's atmosphere

zgrillo2004zgrillo20040 Posts: 0Member
edited March 2007 in Technical Questions and Answers #1
Hi. Im trying to find a way to produce light scattering using 3DS Max 7. I have been making planet atmopsheres by gradient mapping and its getting dull. the inaccuracies for gradient mapping are that you don't see the effect when the light source first appears on the horizon if you were to orbit around it. in realism, the atmosphere should extend the light sourcing so that the atmosphere can be seen just before the star rises from the horizon.

Is there a way to make this sort of rendering?
Post edited by zgrillo2004 on

Posts

  • ZabieglyZabiegly176 Posts: 0Member
    #2
    First thing that comes to my mind is subsurface scattering.

    Or you try to setup a shader which takes the lighting information of the surface, expands it and uses that as a mask for selfillumination. Now I'm not that familiar with max's material system and don't know if that would be possible to setup. But it should do the trick in theory.
  • CoolhandCoolhand287 Mountain LairPosts: 1,296Member
    #3
    you could use 2 lights perhaps. If you can set it up so one affects only the atmosphere and 'rises' first and one which is the real sun which affects everything but the atmosphere.
  • ZabieglyZabiegly176 Posts: 0Member
    #4
    Or you shell out 400 quid and pick apart this modell and see how he's done it:
    3D max earth space globe
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User]2 Posts: 3Member
    #5
    Try using a Falloff map set to Fresnel with the camera Z viewing angle (I think, I don't have Max open) instead of the gradient map. Coolhand's idea has a lot of merit too and could be used in conjunction with the Falloff for maximum effect.
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    #6
    Easiest way is to enable some self-illumination though, controlled by a falloff. You can tint that too in order to get chromatic scatter effects. Quick n' dirty. Note, though, you have to render pretty close to actually see the effect of light scattering in the atmosphere. Most full globe images taken by missions like Apollo show a clean cut terminus and the scatter effect is lost in the lack of exposure dynamics
Sign In or Register to comment.