HOW CAN I CREATE THE PROCEDURAL MATERIAL OF A PLANET?
Mary Logan, Bradford
Creating procedural material in Blender is really fun, and here I’ll show you how I made the base procedural material for this planet.
The very first thing we need to do is to add a primitive geometry in the 3D space (a sphere) and fix the level of detail, increasing the subdivision of the surface. Once that’s done we can smooth the shade of the sphere by applying the ‘Object – Shade Smooth’. At this point, we can add new material in the mesh (give it a name like ‘Procedural Planet’ or ‘Planet Material’) and open the Shader Editor panel to start the creation of the procedural material.
Now we can start to add the essential nodes of this material, the very first being the Noise Texture and Musgrave Texture, the base nodes of the material. The Noise Texture will be used for the terrain of the planet while the Musgrave Texture will be utilised to add the clouds at the top. After that we need two Hue Saturation Value filters, two Mix filters and last but not least the Gamma filter, this one will help us with the displacement of the clouds.
Now we can start to link those elements together, so the first connection is between the Noise Texture and the first Hue Saturation Value filter, then we can connect this filter to the first Mix filter
(in the second input of the Color2 filter). Next, link this filter to the second Hue Saturation Value filter. Now link this filter to the second Mix filter (this time in the first input of the Color1 filter).
After this, we can link the Musgrave Texture to the top input of the second Mix filter, above the Color1 input. Now we just need to link this filter to the Base Color input of the Principled BSDF of the material, and at the same time link the filter to the Gamma filter. That will be linked to the Displacement input of the Material output.
Once all the links have been done, we can start setting up the base parameters of this material. In the Noise Texture we have to set the scale up to 5.700, the detail up to 3.000 and the roughness around 0.500 - 0.700. In the first Hue Saturation Value I suggest decreasing the Saturation to 0.200, while increasing it to 1.500 in the second Hue Saturation Value. Regarding the first Mix filter in the Color1 input, we can select the colour of the planet while in the second Mix filter in the Color2 input, we can select the colour of the clouds.
In the Musgrave Texture I then set the Scale to 4.100, the detail to 5.200, the Dimension to 0.700 and the Lacunarity to 1.900. Last but not least I set the Gamma to 0.020, a low parameter that will underline the clouds.
These are the base parameters for the procedural material of the planet, but you can also decrease the roughness of the Principled BSDF, or even increase the Subsurface to have a particular light interaction. Just take your time and start to experiment with different filters and parameters in order to create your hyperrealistic planet.