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The past few weeks I’ve been working on a new version of my Milky Way or as it stands now, the Sol project. Lots of research have been done before I attempted to restart this project, I wanted to do things in a good way and with better results than before.

Doing my research I stubled upon something that keeps giving me a much improved quality of my renders. The atmosphere shader by Welter. The shader produces very good results for the earth atmosphere and it was one of the key things that made this project work and with a little fiddling it also produced good results for both Mars and our lovely Moon. Together with all new and improved shaders and materials for Earth’s surface, clouds and atmosphere I could finally get the quality I aimed for.

Textures are also brand new, most of them are now 21600×10800 big, with much better specular, bump and surface details. Moon and Mars textures are still 8192×4096 though, but they are good enough for now as long as I do not do any extreme close ups. It’s chewing it’s fair bit of memory with all these high resolution textures, but so far I can handle it pretty good.

What is left to do, and what I feel the biggest need for more work lies are with the background. Currently it’s just a simple shader that produces some noise, I’ve been looking for some good star-maps to use but they have all been too low resolution to use. I might try to create something within Cinema 4D’s pyrocluster or thinking particles system, but I have yet no real idea on how to approach that or how to produce nebulae’s to the standards I’m aiming for.

I’ve been thinking about doing some form of xPresso for the project, getting orbits/rotations and some sliders for controlling year/month/day cycle, no idea how feasible it would be to something like that, if anyone have any good links regarding this, please let me know I would greatly appreciate any related links on the subject of xPresso in the context of “planet simulation” and of course any nebulae related links for Cinema 4D as-well.