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Making planets

Rodrigo Duarte May, 18th 2012 7 Comments

We will learn how to make planets with spheres and the Solid Terrain and Solid Rock shaders. We will use a Starfield background to finish the scene

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Comments

  1. mychicora
    mychicora

    Your setup explanation could be more thorough and helpful. I can’t even get the starfield to render, though I have set it as a “Visible” background in the Environment pallet.

  2. Rodrigo

    Hi, are you rendering from a camera view or from the modeling window?
    If you are rendering from the modeling window, you may have the window in orthographic view (the slider at the top of the window to the left) and in that case you will get a black background. Starfield requires Lens: Normal 50mm or Lens: Wide Angle 24mm to render. Please let us know if this was the case.

  4. mychicora
    mychicora

    Thanks for the reply. I just changed from orthographic view to non-ortho and my star field DOES now render.

    However, after creating a sphere (planet) and applying the first texture you show, I cannot get the planet to render. I added some directional lights to see if that makes a difference, but it doesn’t. I tried adding a camera with the planet as my target, but that makes no difference. I even tried adding a smaller sphere in front of my planet, setting it to “Make Construction,” and using that sphere as my camera’s target, but no joy. Nothing shows up but the star field.

    What am I doing wrong??

  6. mychicora
    mychicora

    Rodrigo,

    I don’t know what caused it, but the sphere wouldn’t even render without the texture. So, I deleted it and recreated it, applied the texture, and now it DOES render properly. Just goes to show that few things in Strata are as “straightforward” as they seem. But thank you for your help in getting this resolved!

  7. Rodrigo

    The sphere mystery will remain a mystery.
    May you perhaps have inadvertently converted it into a construction object? (Cmd+7 on the Mac /Ctrl+7 on the PC) Construction objects appear in the modeling windows but will not render.

    Next time it happens try Selection>Make Construction Normal (or Cmd+8 / Ctrl+8).

    Any planet images to share? 🙂

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