A:M Tutorial Planet Glow


As you can see in any space - movie or series (i dont suppose you've had the possibility to wahtch with your own eyes yet) a planet seems to glow when a light source (sun) is lighting it from behind.
I dont want to explain the detailed physics here because it is not relevant for an animator/modeler. You should know that a planets atmosphere is thinning out towards the void.

Due to limitations of all A:M tools that could be used for this task (Glow, Bloom, Gradient Combiner, etc.), this is not a very easy thing to do.

Yves Poissant played a very long time with all the tools and fianlly coded a plugin that does a very good job with glows. Its free for download here: Yves Planet Glow plugin.

The technique i'll describe here only uses native A:M tools, but has a shortcoming: the halo does not look that realistic because its either too small or to thick. Probably you will be able to tweak the settings for your project to make it look realistic, i have found it easier to combine this technique with Yves plugin.

start pos: 0/0/0 end pos: 0/0/0 Edge Threshold: -50 (right this value is negative!) attribute1: col diff: light blue transp.: 100 attribute2: col diff: light blue transp.: 0 (well, 50% might be better ;) ) dont care about the material preview .. it looks different in a render. the result will be a quite long gradient towards the inside of the planet, and quite a short gradient towards the void. which will be a nice glow. this material should receive shadows normally and in my test render it produced a nice realistic atmosphere effect. probably the size of the sphere is important - mine rad a radius of about 100cm.


All material on this pages is © by Marcel Bricman aka ZPiDER.