Planetary atmospheric effects

#1

Hi everyone.
I’m trying to make a planet with an atmosphere. I am making an animation and I would like to get simmilar atmospheric effect as in Space Engine. I noticed it has a very nice shader for that. I understand that making color differences depending on the angle of sunlight would be hard so currently I’m wondering whats the best way for making a simple atmosphere.
The camera would be zooming from fully framed planet to a close up so I guess it has to be volumetric fog (maybe I can do a variation of post production and volumetric effects).
I am using 3d studio max and vray. I have tried vray environmental fog. It can be great at close up, but from far, the edges of the fog container (sphere gizmo) are very visible and the fadeout (function mainly for making hard container edges soft) doesn’t work and slows down rendering numerous times.
Have anyone ever done something like this and has some tips? I would be very thankful.

#2

Pette Draper had a nice tutorial on that subject. Try to google it out.
Yes, the omni inside the planet (with attenuation on) and with (blue) volume light, should do the trick.
You don’t need to render it in Vray. Render in scanline, and for the planet give it a matte/shadow material (with atmosphere (at object depth) turned on), and then just compose it over your vray render of the planet.

#3

Thanks for the reply. Your method seems great, however i cannot figure out how do I make planets shadow fall on the volume fog.
I cannot find anything related to this subject by Pette Draper however. Looks like the links in his site are dead

#4

If you want to use vray, I found a workaround. What I did was to use an object as gizmo to contain an atmosphere effect fog, and then add other gizmos and more vray environment fog to other gizmos mimicking layers of atmosphere.
To give a final touch I got an object wth vray light material applied and a falloff map to opacity, which was used as the outmost layer and give that bluish tint.