[Released] Aeridian Heavenly Bodies, Planets & Asteroids [Commercial]
E-Arkham
Posts: 733
Hello folks,
My latest set takes you to outer space: https://www.daz3d.com/aeridian-heavenly-bodies-planets-and-asteroids
It's a bit of a departure as I'm trying something new. These are really big models, with a massive skydome and a distant sun as its main light source. My original idea was to make these much smaller scale, but I noticed that the sun's lighting didn't look quite right at lower scales. By playing around with ideas I found that if I had a really huge sun, very far away, the lighting was much closer to how it actually works in space. Of course I couldn't go true scale -- that would be insane, space is MASSIVE -- but the props are all quite large nonetheless.
With the dome, no matter where you point the camera, you get a backdrop of stars. Rotating the sun inside the dome lets you put the lighting where ever you want. My fav thing was to put the sun off in the distance, providing some nice rim lighting against asteroids and planets. There's a seperate sun as well should you prefer some other interesting set up.
The sun and planets all have multiple parts. You can rotate the cloud layers, hide or show the rings, hide or show the atmosphere, and there's a aura which gives you a fast glow around a planet. The sun has glow and ghost lighting parts that can be hidden or rotated as well.
There's a variety of planet and sun presets, including mud, ice and volcano worlds, and some nebula backdrops to sprinkle in a little colour to the inky depths of space.
As a reminder, the scale of these models is quite large. So I include this refresher on the product page:
"To better simulate the vast distances of outer space, these are large oversized props. Remember that Daz Studio allows you to easily focus cameras on distant or large objects with the "Center Object" button. You can also use the W-A-S-D keys to more quickly navigate a scene (by default, toggle this on or off using SHIFT + K). For your convenience, scaling presets are included to shrink the models to make navigation and placement easier."
https://www.daz3d.com/aeridian-heavenly-bodies-planets-and-asteroids
I hope this quirky little set fires up the imagination. I know I had a lot of fun making the promos. As always, I'm open to comments, feedback, and renders.
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Comments
What's next? Zombies in space? LOL I'm getting it today, looks great.
Looks amazing could always use more space sets
Thankya! Zombies in space won't be next, but I've been considering my own take on a zombie HD. Also I'm pretty sure I'm going to be saying "Zombies! In! Spaaaace!" to myself the rest of the day now, haha.
Thanks! I'm dying to get some space vehicles and mecha finished sooner or later. I've got a few that are WIP but I've with over a dozen projects in various stages of completion, I don't know when they'll be done. Had to stop guessing on release months, since I've overestimated it every time. On the plus side, that means there will never be a shortage of new releases from me over the coming year!
It's hard to tell from your promos, but something I do with Grand Designer for earthlike worlds is to put the output through Wilbur, nuking some continents down to island chains. This lets you tune the overall planet to look a bit less like pure fractal noise.
Hm, never heard of Grand Designer or Wilbur filters before. Looks interesting, I'll have to keep an eye on that one.
The bases on mine are fractal, but I layered multiple different types on top, with random triplanar mapping rotations as well as handpainted work. And the oceans were their own stacks of multiple layers, too. In the end, there was so much stuff going on it turned into a full custom smart material, though I have no idea what use it'd have outside of planet generation. 3d table maps, maybe.
Wilbur is a heightmap editor: http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html
It has a lot of powerful functions that you can apply to the entire planet or to individual continents as desired. Grand Designer comes with a boatload of fractal types to choose from and results in planets looking like yours, but I use Wilbur to make the result less uniform. Wilbur's most famous power in worldbuilding circles is its erosion features - you can make some amazing channel systems with it. This carries up to equirectangular projections but getting it right on 16k heightmaps was pretty time consuming, though the latest version multithreads this so yay.
Your oceans do look wonderful. I've only been toying with it a bit, right now what clearly shows as underwater seamounts, craters, and continental shelf in GD looks like ugly noise when imported into DAZ. I need to work on it more. Rings import with little fuss, at least. I would love to get atmospherics like GD's into DAZ, if it is even possible.
I picked up Wilbur (again) recently when I was reminded Fractal Terrains exist. And Fractal Terrains, but then I also remembered just how frustrating FT can be to actually use.
@Oso3D If you are looking for a great tool to generate terrains (as heightmaps), check out Gaea. The community version is free. Somewhat limited in resolution, but still great. The indie version is also not expewnsive. I have useed the output in Vue, UNreal Engine and ZBrush.
https://quadspinner.com/Gaea
Ciao
TD
Always up for more generators... I bought World Creator a while back, but the problem I always have in Daz Studio is trying to have maps big enough to look good and not look tiled. Mutter
Grand Designer is AMAZING, thanks for the reference. I had recently played with Fractal Terrains again and was disappointed by how clunky and old it was; Grand Designer is apparently a worthy successor.
Yeah, I tossed Grand Designer on my wishlist. I'll probably grab it next Steam sale.
This looks awesome. I had to wishlist this one as I just picked up your winter abandoned gas station. But will be picking it up as soon as I can swing it. This will look great with the Aeridian throne room in the middle of space.
Thanks! I had the promo with the throne room in mind almost from the very start.
One thing I forgot to mention... I've found the space dome + sun figure useful for more than just space scenes. Switching out the stars texture for a sky blue one and you get a massive skydome, and can visualize where the sunlight will come from pretty easily. Saves having to go into Iray preview mode to set up lighting.
Was looking for a good "space set" for iRAY. This mentions a dome? So not a sphere? Does a dome work well in iray? Do all images need to be angled up to avoid the horizon line on the dome? If I needed a spaceship battle scene, do I angle camera's 90 degrees?
Sorry, looks good but I am having trouble understanding the usage. Any youtube's on using it?
Sorry, no videos, but I think I can explain it clearly.
I called it a dome here in the thread, but not in the product description. It IS a giant sphere; there is no groundplane or horizon. I'm not sure why I used "dome" here, guess I thought that was easier to understand its usage. You will need to make sure the default groundplane in Daz Studio is turned off in render settings, or obviously it will block the lower half of the solar system and any planets that are too low on the Y axis. The solar system figure itself does not have a groundplane.
The background solar system is a massive sphere, and the sun is rigged around a central point, so the sun rotates within the solar system. The sun has multiple parts for corona, haze, etc. Sun is all Iray, which is the main source of light, and the stars are also iray emissive though the light they provide is generally too faint to light the scene. It works fine in Iray because it basically blocks any environment lighting and instead uses the lighting from the sun.
It was specifically designed for creating floating space scenes (asteroids, space ships, etc) so that you don't have to worry about special camera angles. The solar system prop is large enough that you can fly around in whatever direction or angle you want, and/or rotate the sun around to put the lighting where you want it, etc.
I strongly recommend using W-A-S-D to navigate with this set, or the "center object" button once you have a space ship/figure/etc in the scene due to the large size of the planets and solar system.
Does that clarify it?
OK, thanks for the clarification! Doesnt the lighting then take a long time since the sun is emissive? Emissive lights always seem to give great detail, but take much longer.
It has more to do with the amount of lighting. Dim emissive takes forever, but the sun emissive is very bright. I didn't have any issues; it didn't seem to be any slower than generic environment lighting on my system.
OK thanks for the follow-up!
Was waiting for a good sale...BAM! Looking forward to trying it out! :)