Texture is always an important part of any image or animation. I always appreciate the high quality work of major animation theaters when it comes to this.
I wanted to learn how this was done myself and experimented with the highly modular node system in Blender used to customize this. Spheres are a great way of visualizing different textures. What is more, I wanted to experiment with luminosity and transparency and light scattering. For this a bright light source and black background would be ideal. The result is shown above.
- The leftmost sphere (the “Sun”) is simply a sphere with a high yellow tinted luminosity.
- The second to left sphere is a half transparent scattering material with a reflective surface meant to imitate water or ice. This was inspired by a tutorial.
- The second to right sphere is a luminescent material with a random pattern coupled to both height/normal and colour to imitate magma material. This was also based on a tutorial.
- The rightmost sphere is something entirely out of my own design, the result of a lot of playing around with texture nodes.
- Up front is the silhouette of a spaceship of my own design, with the dashboard barely visible through the window.
The entire setup was rendered using Cycler integrated into Blender and adding a bit of foggy glow in the afterwards composition. The compete Blender file can be downloaded from here.
Thanks to Reddit User u/X_Joshi_X for the background stars HDR.
