Diamond Ring

[esd]

This planetoid is surrounded by a ring of almost pure diamonds, debris from a wandering black hole with which it had a near-fatal encounter. The diamonds have stained black over the countless years, radioactive from their exposure to space.

This planet is an extreme navigational hazard, as nothing passes through a ship's hull quite as easily as a 1,000mph diamond pellet.

[ external image ]

(Click image to enlarge)

I've been working on this a little at a time for over a week now, tweaking this, tweaking that. Originally it was a wide shot of the planet with the ring around it, and the ring was made of ice. I was using a C4D spherical terrain as a placeholder for the ring debris, which caused huge memory problems when I started playing with the density of the ring. I tightened the shot and completely replaced the debris with meshes moulded "by hand", and changed the ice into diamond.

[Electric_Kola]

Lovely peice of work there mate, I especially like the diamond thingys, makes it look all shiny and beautiful

Also some of them are shaped like teardrops or waterdrops, a unusual sight around planets.

Nice one!

[esd]

Thanks! The diamonds were definately the most challenging bit to get right - not just their shape, but their positions, the ring density, slight variations in scale and the textures.
They're actually transparent, using the natural refractive properties of diamond, it's just that in dark space there's no much behind them to refract.

[MGA]

Your artworks never fail to amaze me esd.

[Avis]

cool,
I find creating this kinda 'environment' a pain in the ass, the system intensity of so many raytraced objects can get overloading,

a thought for increasing the density of the field would be to pre-render very very small particles of ice/crystal/mud in the form of a ring and add some planes with the texture (using transparancy/alpha map to make only the chunks visible) clone and rotate the layer a few times should help create a more 'dense' and varied field...

ok I accept that probably didn't make any sence

[ external image ]
click image for higher res,

this took me a few minutes, its far from perfect and would need 'some' real objects to give the field more depth, but as it stands I made a ring of dense stars in this case (hence it not being too good) applied to a 1x1 plane (minimal polys = quicker render times)

anyway hope thats of some use.
if I was too confusing just PM me It is late

[esd]

I know exactly what you mean - I was going to try using dull volumetric lights with high dust values to create the dusty particles, but that threw the render time into the sky.

So, take a disk plane object and scatter it.. hmm, I like that idea! Thanks Avis

[Jon Tetrino]

I know exactly what you mean - I was going to try using dull volumetric lights with high dust values to create the dusty particles, but that threw the render time into the sky.

So, take a disk plane object and scatter it.. hmm, I like that idea! Thanks Avis

yea that seems to be a good idea

personally when i tried my ring i used a particle system that was set to create each particle with a different seed of noise.

ill find it and upload it

and ESD, PWNT!

[esd]

and ESD, PWNT!

Huh?

[Avis]

think you may have mis understood (understandable I do ramble a bit)

what I meant is that scene I uploaded has 1 sphere and 1 (1x1) plane, the 1 plane makes up the entire particle ring, its a simple 'cheat' in 3D terms but it works well enough

I used a variation of this texture I made for the job (the actual one I used I deleted after rendering) to create the same effect apply this material (with the black transparant to multiple planes which are about twice the size of the planet (bigger or smaller depending on preference)

I also set the plane to not cast shaddows only recieve them.
anyway hope its of some use, its a very render friendly way of creating a mass of 'realatively' stationary particles

[esd]

Nope, hadn't misunderstood - that's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking, although I'm considering using actual rocks for the pre-rendered debris - just got to work out the most efficient way of creating the texture

[silentWitness]

I'm going to have a go... This week I've learnt Smoke... next week I'm learning explosions...

[Avis]

Nope, hadn't misunderstood - that's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking, although I'm considering using actual rocks for the pre-rendered debris - just got to work out the most efficient way of creating the texture

yup using rocks would definately look better, and also allows room for using a bumpmap on them too.

the most effective way I can think of (off the top of my head) is to render a good cluster of rocks then using somthing like photoshops clone patern stamp paint a high res square aspect (ie 800x800 1024x1024) image in said rocks, then use the erraser to clear out what you dont want..
that would be my method anyway,, I'm sure PSP has a similar patern stamp feature.

[Deleted User]

That is stunning work. The concept of a planet surrounded by diamond rings has me thinking there is great profittssss to be made

[esd]

Been having trouble with continuing on this, both time and the actual challenge of it.

Using the plain disc method like you did, Avis, just doesn't seem to be working. It becomes obvious when the disc approaches or passes through one of the existing rocks that it's a 2D object.

So, I've thought of an adaptation, where I emit lots of tiny single-poly planes with images of small roid clusters, and make it always face camera. I'm just having problems with the lighting, as the light source is a little behind them.

I'll get there though

That is stunning work. The concept of a planet surrounded by diamond rings has me thinking there is great profittssss to be made

There sure is, only as I said, it's an EXTREME navigational hazard. You wouldn't want to take a ship to within 1AU of that thing, in case you got hit by a little debris.