Now You Can Make Beautiful Planets in Blender!

Make the most amazing planets using physically-accurate techniques!
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Chapters
0:00 - Chapter Title
Hashtags
#Blender #Materials #CyclesRender #VisualEffects #ChristopherFraser #Filmmaker #Creator #VFX #Blender3D #MotionGraphics #Filmmaking
We make donuts blender with Simon Thommes procedural node setup showing 1-year progress with free 3d materials and shaders. Quick and easy we use lazy tutorial by Blender Guru to create Andrew Price Chair Tutorial Couch Series, Kitchen and cool Lighting in Octane an Cycles Eevee renders. Also, secret ingredient to photorealism included in the recipe. Blender space

[@quintin7203]

Just finished this tutorial after buying the pack. For anyone on the fence about buying the pack, DO buy it. It's awesome, detailed and real easy to work with.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

YES, amazing! So glad you enjoy it.

[@Undy1]

Solar irradiance at Earth's distance from the Sun is 1361W/m2 Mars - 586W/m2 Jupiter - 50.26W/m2 Saturn - 14.82W/m2 Uranus - 3.69W/m2 Neptune - 1.51W/m2

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Did the math! This is good reference right here, actually. Use these values if you want physical accuracy. Technically my value is good too I think, just for inside Earth's atmosphere...

[@Undy1]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Honestly it doesn't matter cause you correct that with exposure anyway. IMO it's better to keep the exposure in color management at 0 and if you need to correct it then use the Exposure in the Film tab - that way you're not messing with the dynamic range of the filmic color space which can sometimes introduce unwanted artifacts or be a problem when rendering to OpenEXR (which won't respect any changes in the Color Management tab). Anyway what matters for planets much more is the surface brightness - as in how much light is reflected. Earth's land reflects on average around 30% of light so the color value should be around 0.3. Water should be much darker - around 5% and ice and clouds should be close to 100%. Moon's surface should be around 12%.

[@gordonbrinkmann]

@@Undy1 Hi, where did you get those values for the light reflection? I was looking for albedo values, and while I found the same for the Moon (0.12), the values I got for Earth were 0.434 geometric albedo and 0.306 Bond albedo - which both seem a bit high compared to your values, since quite a large amount of our surface is covered in water so I would estimate (with your 0.30 and 0.05 for land and water) an average value lower than 0.30, but I guess the higher values I got are with atmosphere and everything so that might not be comparable. No criticism on your values, just curiosity where to look up something like that.

[@Undy1]

@@gordonbrinkmann honestly I found several conflicting sources for the water albedo so I chose the most reliable one I guess. A lot of sources have just the land data and nothing for water. NASA's visible earth textures seem to be pretty accurate when it comes to brightness/albedo - the water being 8% there.

[@FireAngelOfLondon]

If you want to avoid the texture problem at the poles don't use a UV Sphere, use an Icosphere. You can still use a subdivision surface modifier if you want, just don't use one with only one level of subdivision.

[@MrTomyCJ]

Are the textures equirectangular? Equirectangular textures *are made to work on UV spheres*. You just need to set it correctly. Use generated texture coordinates, set texture interpolation to smart and projection method to sphere. Lots of planetary images (like those provided by NASA) are equirectangular. Meaning they use an equirrectangular projection. This way you don't need nearly as many polys. (credits to Blender Secrets). edit: enviroment textures may "transform" a texture into an equirectangular projection or something like that? I'm not sure how that works.

[@drjosephfarah]

alternatively, you could start from a cube, subdivide in edit mode, and use shift-alt-s to get a perfect sphere.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Somebody suggested using a round cube and using an Environment Texture node! I think I'll do that next time...

[@FireAngelOfLondon]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX You can use any shape, a round cube, a sphere of either type will all do. Instead of using UV coordinates use "generated" and set the mapping in the image node to "sphere" instead of flat.

[@meatmeep3462]

@@MrTomyCJ This is my question and honestly it should be declared upfront on the site and on the KZbin, because if they are NOT equirectangular they are pretty much pointless.

[@samathewphercholas4802]

Love it! Thank you for posting!

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Thank you ;)

[@BlueprintScience]

That looks great!

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Many thanks!

[@ffs369]

Amazing video really helped thanks :)

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Good. Time to pump out some sweet renders!

[@john1995]

Good way to explain, good audio, good quality, good channel.. You got a new subscriber!

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Fantastic! I'm happy to hear that😁

[@TiagoTiagoT]

Since you're dealing with spherical objects, it might make sense to define the UV coordinates mathematically with shader nodes instead of bothering with how the polygons might get unwrapped. edit: And actually, you don't even need to do the math yourself, just use a Environment Texture node instead of Image, and feed the Object texture coordinates into the vector input of that node.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

That's very true, next time I should do it that way!

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Now seeing the edit, that's a really smart solution

[@I_am_Spartacus]

I've been hunting around for ages trying to figure this out... the polar pinching on textures was really bugging me out... I'm just comparing a now and after to see what the difference is between two Earth renders....

[@terra_altenate1299]

You can use exponential function for atmosphere thickness to make it more realistic :)

[@NightShinerStudio]

How?

[@samk9632]

solid

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Means a lot coming from you! Thanks man 😄

[@samk9632]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX no problem man, keep it up

[@clausbohm9807]

Thanks for the heads up on the site for planet textures. Best one yet, worth the 11 bucks I had to spend on it. This looks better then those cheezy B-rated movie scenes. We can throw a few chunks of rocks (asteroids) into the rings for FX.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Thank you! That's great to hear. I'm quite proud of them myself :)

[@SpringySpring04]

I'm curious whether these textures were handcrafted/painted by artists or if they were procedurally generated then tweaked, etc.. seems really interesting!

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Largely they're based on real scanned planets, actually! Then there's some proceduralism that makes them each unique. Pulling out all the stops to make great textures

[@SpringySpring04]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX ohh interesting! I would love to get my hands on some planet scans, lol

[@octave_jagora]

Spicy

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Thank you🌶️

[@meatmeep3462]

Displacement settings do not show on my version of Blender. Edit: for those of you wondering, you have to be set to Cycles not Evee to get displacement settings, and even then they have been changed since update, so the menu options are not the same as in this video.

[@bobogus7559]

Just FYI, you can fix the polar distortion and get nicer topology by instead using a round cube from the Add menu. Set the arc divisions fairly high (I usually go to around 30 before I add a subdivision surface modifier). The shape is indistinguishable from a UV sphere, but because every face is a quad there is no polar distortion from subdividing (and you can subdivide as high as you need and always have a quad-only mesh).

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Yeah. By default though they aren't properly UV unwrapped, but in the future I'll probably recommend a round cube, and using "environment texture" nodes instead of "image texture" nodes

[@bobogus7559]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX I normally create planets using procedural textures, so UV unwrapping isn't typically an issue. Instead, my main issue is trying to figure out how to add particle surfaces for things like rocks or trees to a mesh displaced using material vectors.

[@navyrayne]

I just wnated to say thanks for showing all of this mister Fraser. I'm a moder working on building custom planets for a space game caleld Kerbal Space Program and I'm interested in using artist driven proc gen to create my worlds in blender. I'm semi familiar with GIMP and Unity as well. Do you have any advice for exporting? The planets in the game need a color map, a height map, and a normal map, to operate correctly.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Yeah! I have another video on a method for making planet textures on my channel, I think it'd be a great way to start. Otherwise, the license for Fraser FX products allows for you to use the textures from the pack, as long as other people can't extract those textures and use them for themselves. Here's the video if you're interested, where I think I talk about "exporting" (baking) the textures as well: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qnbFqGmInrZgrbc Otherwise, you can find plenty of tutorials for baking your procedural textures from Blender. Hope this helps!

[@navyrayne]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Thanks!

[@nigellill3222]

This has to be the best video for creating planets on the net, especially the addition of clouds & atmosphere. Kudos, really looks good. Question about the rings: don't get me wrong they look great & this is just a thought on my part (please correct me if i'm wrong) but I thought rings are made up of dust & rocks, individual components forming rings ? You may have made it this way for viewing it from a distance in which case it doesn't matter. Love your channel 👍🏼🦘

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Thanks a lot! Yup, the rings are made for distant viewing, but particle systems are a great place to start for creating a dense asteroid field scene if that's what you're looking for.

[@nigellill3222]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Thanks for the reply, appreciate it. You really put together a good tutorial. I thought it was meant to be viewed from a distance due to the detail you put into the planet. I assume modelling the rings using particles would be heavy on rendering due to the number of particles used ?.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

@@nigellill3222 surprisingly not in Cycles. the viewport hates it, but I've got a video planned on rendering thousands of high-poly objects using particles, actually!

[@nigellill3222]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Great, i'll look forward to watching it 👍🏼

[@sione_etc]

fantastic tutorial! i had to work out a lot of this stuff on my own for a project i did a few years ago (the video is 'Lonelyspeck - Mantle' if you want to check it out), this tutorial would've been a lifesaver for me back then haha

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Let's hope other people got to it sooner 🤞

[@jeb_kerm1671]

In order to avoid detail clustering with the subsurf modifier, you could also just use an icosphere. The points are distributed much more evenly as you subdivide the mesh, so the detail clustering is pretty much imperceptible

[@captain3d697]

Or just use an rounded cube with shift alt s

[@jeb_kerm1671]

@@captain3d697 that works too, yeah

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Both are great solutions! I think in the future I'll use a rounded cube, and then use an Environment Texture node for the maps, as another commenter suggested. I tested that out and it works great

[@tomchristoffer]

@@captain3d697 Hey, sorry to drag this up 3 months later but I'm having trouble with this polar stretching. From what I've seen, rounded cubes and icospheres both don't work without spherical projection on the image nodes. I'm trying to export the sphere as a gltf object but GLTF doesn't export the projection so I kind of need the UV's to be correct themselves, and I can't figure that out...

[@glazeydonut]

I am new to blender and would love to know how to export the planet with the textures after getting the result with this tutorial? (I am wanting to import the planet with the textures into unreal engine 5)

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Making a planet in Unreal is a bit of a different process, since it has it's own system for materials and such. The planet textures will work on most spheres in 3D programs, though, so with a good planet setup in Unreal, you can still use the textures!

[@jadenmapoy4757]

man this guy's channel is so phenomenal, so helpful, clear audio. can always count on Chris to drop some helpful tips!

[@salvobehar2700]

Hey man I just purchased the pack, but can't find anywhere to download them? And there's no way to contact through your website, so hoping for some help?

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Hey! You should be given a download at checkout. You will also receive an email with a download link, just to make sure you don't lose it! In the future, you can email [e-mail], or message me on Instagram @real.christopherf

[@salvobehar2700]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Ok sounds good, and I wasn't given any download at checkout, but I did recieve the email, also without a download link. Should we move this to the emai or instagram?

[@exorcist3d99]

The volume was covering up my planet surface and hiding the surface more than yours, not sure why :( if I could offer some critique it'd be to keep the entire node setup in view once in a while

[@MrFeliks912]

What about stars?

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Noise texture... ...and maybe a surprise update coming soon (free to owners of Planet Textures Vol. 2)

[@erictao2610]

how to invert the node at 11:12? does anybody know whats heppen?

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

I meant to say disable. Turn on the "Node Wrangler" addon in your Blender preferences (it comes pre-installed), then press "M" while any node is selected to bypass it. It might actually not be a node wrangler feature, but you should have it enabled anyway!

[@DogOnAKeyboard]

I feel like I'm missing something simple but how are you able to change the sun's light unit? All I see is generic strength.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

That's a fine question! Maybe I should have clarified. I'm using an amazing addon called "Photographer" that lets me do that. Setting the normal "Strength" to the same thing that I did will give you the same result, though!

[@DogOnAKeyboard]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Ah that explains it, thanks!

[@TiagoTiagoT]

Not sure if you caught my edit on my previous comment before since you seem to have replied so quickly. So just in case, I'll copypaste the addition: And actually, you don't even need to do the math yourself, just use a Environment Texture node instead of Image, and feed the Object texture coordinates into the vector input of that node.

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

That's really clever! I didn't realize you could do that...

[@vegonomia-nosprotegendodoc9011]

Weird. Saturn has some rendering problem with its hexagon

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Strange! Could you describe a bit more the issue?

[@razeezar]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX I think this is a joke about the phenomena at the actual planet Saturn's poles (IRL) - Look it up! Maybe it's a glitch in the matrix, or 'God' forgot to subdivide Saturn's mesh? ;-)

[@Sky_v1nes]

I've been trying to figure out my problem with the clouds for awhile now, but I keep having a problem where the duplicate that I add the cloud texture to, just becomes a white sphere with black clouds that covers up my planet Update: I fixed it :)

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Weird! What did you do to fix that?

[@CrustyMuffin33]

Same problem. I think it has something to do with transparency but I can't figure it out

[@user-xt5gv7pp7j]

Oh its amazing, Waiting to cat content

[@antipoti]

A picture of the final render would have been really nice at the end of the video. 🙁

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

You're right, I forgot that! I will remember for next time.

[@MrTomyCJ]

The textures seem to take the artistic approach not to include a different climate at the poles.

[@nkanyisoinnocentkhwane3752]

Quick question

[@nkanyisoinnocentkhwane3752]

I bought your Planet Textures & Advanced Compositing Nodes because the site brought them up as I was finishing my purchase. All I can download is the Compositing nodes, I looked at all 3 emails & I can't get hold of the Textures. I can buy the Planet Textures again but at this point I've spent 26 dollars on Compositing nodes I don't need at the moment so I'm hoping if I wait a few hours there's going to be a link to the product I wanted today. Can you help resolve the issue?

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Hey! This is a problem some people have had, but it's been fixed for all future orders. If you email [e-mail] with the email you used for the purchase and include your order number, I can send you a fresh download link by email.

[@nkanyisoinnocentkhwane3752]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Thanks will do

[@nkanyisoinnocentkhwane3752]

appreciate you hearing the comments because KZbin has horrible notifications when it comes to likes & comments 🙏🏽😇

[@nkanyisoinnocentkhwane3752]

@@ChristopherFraserVFX Will share my work on Instagram but I'm planning 3 two minute long short films so it's gonna take awhile but you were instrumental in my progress

[@Game-Garden]

Little to no reason to spend 30 bucks on these planet textures when you can make your own for free. They're not scans of planets themselves like this video claims cause obvious reasons

[@ChristopherFraserVFX]

Definitely never claimed they're scans of real planets, but they're definitely made *from* scans of real planets. If you wanna make your own, more power to you! Good luck :)