Messing around with procedural textures.

Hi, I’m trying to figure out this texture thing. I’m playing around with clouds, noise and blends to try and get interesting results.
I haven’t gotten all the fine nuances down yet.



Does anyone have an idea why it looks like there’s a green patch well beyond the terminator where there is no ‘cloud’ cover. (around the vertical middle of the planet). And why does it look like near the south pole someone has been cutting cubes out of the planet? (What is that ‘effect’ called? I’m sure it’s much easier when I can ask "I have such-and-so edges near the south pole, how do I get rid of them?)

All the objects are surface spheres.
The only bitmap texture used is the background (Which is rather coarse)

Hi.

Those stepped shadow borders seem to be so-called “terminator artifacts” that can be seen in many render engines (see here for reference). Increasing the poly count of that sphere should greatly reduce those artifacting. Add a subsurf modifier to that sphere and see if that helps!

Thanks! So I best make mesh objects of them then?
Is there an advantage of using the icosphere over the uvsphere or does that not matter much?

Thanks!

I discovered why the green patch is there. It’s an island in a dark sea in a cloudgap. It should be there. Forget I asked.

Ah, sorry, I completely skipped over the fact that you’re using NURBS spheres. Those have their own resolution settings:


Just increase the Resolution U and V to something higher than the default value of 4. You can change the values for preview and render independently: If the Render U and V are set to 0, they will use the Preview resolution.

As for the icosphere vs. UV sphere: When it comes to subsurf, they’re both not ideal…:eyebrowlift2: Subsurf works best on quads, but the icosphere is triangles only and the UV sphere has triangles at the poles that can cause pinching. So, the best choice for Subsurf might actually be the polysphere (extra objects addon - perhaps you need to enable it in the user preferences).

I think I got rid of the artefacts. Thank you!