DEPRECATED. This shader is unsupported, but it may still get installed with Softimage to provide compatibility with older scenes that
use it. It is recommended that you replace unsupported shaders in your scenes with equivalent shaders from the current Softimage
shader library.
| Sun | Moon | Stars | Ground | Cloud | Environment Atmosphere
Material (Soft3D)
Output: Color (RGB) value
Uses advanced numerical techniques to simulate the scattering that light undergoes when traveling through an atmosphere. You
can simulate both a view of a planet from outer space and an outside view at the planet's surface.
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The shader's name. Enter any name you like, or leave the default.
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Atmospheric
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Determines the position of the point of view relative to the planet's center.
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The planet's radius. A default value of 600 0000 m corresponds roughly to the Earth.
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This is a scale thickness of the atmosphere. The default value of 7400 m corresponds to the thickness the Earth's atmosphere
would have were it uniform in density.
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This again is a scaling factor for the atmosphere's density. Modifying it has effects on the color of the sky and the sunset.
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A smaller sphere of dust is a part of the atmosphere. This parameter defines its height.
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The density of the dust. The dust makes a gray-colored haze appear. It will make a very effective halo around the sun as well.
You may want to set this to 0 for Arctic clarity of the air. When it is set high, the sun will no longer be discernible from
the glare.
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Sun
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The size of the sun disk in degrees.
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The color of the sun. Our sun is very close to white.
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Should the dust produced halo not be sufficient, this parameter makes it possible to make the edges of the sun appear more fuzzy.
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Moon
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The size of the moon in degrees. On the Earth, the sun and the moon are roughly the same size.
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The color of the moon. This is really the diffuse reflectivity of the moon, which is modeled as a ball. Our moon is really
a rather dark object which only appears bright at night because the sun is so much brighter than the night.
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Makes a halo around the moon. Good for simulating a frosty night.
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Stars
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A bias on the random brightness distribution.
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Scales the brightness of the stars. Sometimes they are too faint and have to be scaled to become visible.
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A scaling factor for the stars.
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The time with which the star's brightness varies.
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Ground
Ground Parameters
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Defines an image clip to use as the ground map. Click to open a property page for the image clip being presently used. To retrieve a new clip, click and indicate whether you wish to create a new clip or create one from a source.
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This window displays the selected image. You can right-click on the image to access the Image Clip Property Editor. If the
image is a sequence, use the playback controls to play the sequence image.
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The Spherical is useful for extraplanetary scenes, where you can map a geographical map on the planet using the traditional
spherical mapping with two pinch points at the poles. When this mapping type is selected, the scaling is no longer in kilometers
and a scaling of 1 means that the map will stretch once around the planet.
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Lollipop is similar to cloud mapping and is useful for ground scenes where you want to place a map on the ground.
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When this box is checked, the ground is just a mirror image of the ceiling.
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Transformations
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The scaling of the map. In lollipop mode, it states how many kilometers each instance of the map should stretch. In spherical
mode, it says how often the map wraps around the planet.
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A rotation of the map
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The translation of the map. The same difference between the modes applies here as with the scale parameter.
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Cloud
Cloud Parameters
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The color of the clouds. Mars has red ones, we like white ones... unless you live in the UK, then you want gray.
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Creates a more turbulent-looking cloud fractal.
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This places the cloud plane in the atmosphere model. 500m is about right.
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Defines the cloud fractal's amplitude.
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The fractal ratio. A value of 0.707 works well.
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Clouds are soft so few iterations are necessary.
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This is the center (expected value) of the fractal. A fractal value of 0 is no cloud while a fractal value of 1 is full cloud.
This parameter is really a balance control between the two extremes and works with the Amplitude in placing the fractal in
the 0..1 domain.
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If checked, the clouds become animatable with the time parameter.
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Only enabled once you check the Animate option. Defines the speed of the animation.
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Transformations
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The clouds are placed on the planet using a lollypop mapping. This means that there will be stretching and a seam at the South
pole (negative Y direction). Scaling is in km for convenience, so that a scaling of 1 will give the clouds largest features
1-km diameter.
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This rotates the fractal. This can be useful eliminating visual artifacts due to repetitiveness in the fractal.
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This offsets the cloud fractal. This can be animated to produce a wind effect.
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