Microbion

The 'Space' plugins

With the release of the 'Earth-like Planet' shader (see here for details), my attempt at providing shaders and objects for space scenes is for the moment complete. I thought it might be interesting to review this process and where it might go from here.

In the beginning was StarScape

This was the first one, and was never envisaged as part of a series. It came into being because the Starfield shader from Maxon is so basic that it's pretty useless, and I couldn't find any third-party plugin to do it better. (This was before the latest incarnation of Redshift.) After much research, trying out software such as Filter Forge and Universe Image Creator, plus reading a great deal on the Shadertoy website, I decided to see if I could port a Shadertoy star field to Cinema. There was a long and very detailed tutorial on YouTube about this, and without that StarScape would not exist, so I'm very grateful to its author.

The port was not easy. The way Shadertoy works is fundamentally different from shaders in C4D, one of the main issues being that what it generates are not so much reusable shaders but full images which can't be altered except by changing the code - there are no parameters a user can easily change, for example. But in the end it worked and I was really pleased with the result.

Gas Giant

Looking through other 'space-oriented' shaders in Cinema the 'Planet' shader is as basic as it gets. I thought there had to be better options than that - sure, you can use a bitmap, whether an actual photo or something produced in a paint app, but that is always going to be limited by available images and in some cases by copyright. So I had the idea of a fully-procedural, customisable planet that I could use to generate whatever type of planet was required. It soon became apparent that a shader which let you generate any planet type in the solar system wasn't viable - it would be huge and difficult to maintain. The first one I chose therefore was a gas giant shader (which also does Venus very well, even though that isn't a gas giant).

This worked to my satisfaction but for one glaring hole: Saturn wasn't going to be possible without rings. That needed another shader; it could and perhaps should have been built into the gas giant shader but it was easier to create it from scratch, not least because the gas giant shader would be applied to a sphere while a rings shader would be added to a disc object. That would require two separate materials anyway, so there might as well be two shaders.

And the rest

To complete a solar system, I needed the sun itself, which actually got two shaders because I wanted the corona to be separate - for the same reason the planetary rings shader was separated from the gas giant. I added a background nebula shader, too. The final components were an object and shader for asteroids, a Mars-like shader and an Earth-like shader. With those, the set was complete, at least for the time being.

So what else is there?

Well, there are other heavenly bodies which could be added. A better galaxy shader, for example, the one in Cinema now. And a comet shader complete with tail. And I'd really like a volumetric nebula you can fly through, and maybe black holes. So there is still scope for more, but the main one missing at the moment is the moon. Developing a shader which looks like the moon is proving tricky; there are some Shadertoy examples worth exploring, but not much else, although I need to have a more detailed look.

Are they useful (and/or actually used)?

That's my main problem with these shaders. I use them, but does anyone else? In terms of downloads, StarScape (the first one I did) has had almost 1000 downloads. Gas Giant over 500, Planet Rings almost 600 (more than the Gas Giant shader in fact - which is unexpected, I thought the two would go together!), the asteroid object and shader over 700, and the rest around the 500 mark apart from Red Planet, which has only had 34 downloads to date (but it is fairly new).

I haven't seen or been told of any renders with these plugins so whether the people who downloaded them are using them or discarded them as being of no use, I don't know. But it doesn't really matter. I code for enjoyment and use what I code, so it's all good. But if anyone reads this and wants to comment on them, please do get in touch via the contact page.