Create Epic Gas Giant Planets in Blender (Fully Procedural) | Blender 3.6 Tutorial
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- Hi everyone! I know it’s been a while but I’m back with a cool new setup for creating fully procedural gas giants in Blender. This setup uses curl fields which I went over in a previous video in more detail to create “wind currents” and vortexes for much greater realism. The results of using this method are truly incredible and I am so glad that I can share them with you all and I hope you enjoy the video.
This project has been a bit of a beast and I’m working on a very clean and user friendly version that improves upon the version in the video dramatically still. I’ll be continuing to post updates on that and my other projects on my Instagram so check that out if you wanna.
Node group file: drive.google.c...
Curl Fields Video (Warning: not my best video): • Awesome Procedural Tex...
I’ve also started a Patreon since this video came out: / alaskanfx
ArtStation: www.artstation...
Instagram: / alaskanfx
Gumroad: windmiller.gum...
PC Specs:
NVIDIA GTX 1650
4 GB VRAM
Intel i7-9750H CPU @2.6GHz
16 GB RAM
![[Blender Tutorial] Create an Epic Volumetric Gas Giant!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/CrAn6j8S1gg/mqdefault.jpg)
If you're here using later versions of Blender, and getting confused 6 mins. in, the Noise Texture node is slightly different from the Musgrave node. Uncheck the "Normalize" box in the Noise Texture node to get it looking the same.
As someone who is obsessed with space renders, I see this as an absolute win.
Absolutely phenomenal looking results. Your tutorials are doing such a public service for those of us that are obsessed with doing space renders.
Thank you so much! Glad to be a part of this community
Excellent tutorial - one additional hack you can do for more detail/depth on the cloudtops, in the top-level gas giant material - you can fork off a branch from the Color Mix node (just before the color ramp that picks the primary colors of your gas giant), plug that into the height of a Bump node (and bring the Strength of the Bump node way down, to ~.04), and then plug that into the Normals input of the final Principled BSDF Shader - it really makes the cloudtops pop on the parts of the gas giant that go from lit to unlit, provides a nice sense of scale and depth. :)
If you also add a small bit of subsurface scattering it give a very volumetric look
One of the best blender space tutorials out here. I am so impressed with the effort you put into this!! I wish you all the luck with your channel! This definitely needs more recognition!!!
Thank you so much! 🪐
nice name dude
Everything was going great up until plugging in the Curl Base.001 result at 13:19, it just gives a solid gray color for me. Every step before that matched your results. Blender 4.0.2
Same here the scale of mine is off as well
Same, does not work.
It seems to me that on new versions of blender this simply does not work
I'm not sure how you guys are getting past 7:24. The second I connect the map range node everything goes pink.
Thanks for the tutorials! these series are insane!
Holy crap, thanks dawg, first ever super! Glad you enjoy the content! 🪐
this is actually astounding work. amazing job. i was chuckling the whole time cuase i was thinking to myself "slow down magic man! i cant keep up with your black magic! what sorcery is this!" it turned out great tho. thank you!!!!
havent seen a gas giant tutorial this realistic, goddamn! you never miss with these tutorials
Thank you so much! I’m glad you enjoyed it
@@AlaskanFX cant wait for future space tutorials, or non space ones, everything you do is awesome!
@@Shimeanimation Thank you so much! That's a wonderful compliment! : )
This is amazing! I was able to make an awesome render of a Saturn-like planet using this and your planet rings tutorial. It amazes me how realistic you can get stuff to look. Thank you for sharing :)
Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed it!
Really nice approach, happy to find a channel for 3d and space/scifi stuff. thanks from france.
This is one of the most amazing tutorials I've ever seen! I can't even imagine how hard you must have worked to create the texture field system. Fantastic work!
THIS is what ive been looking for, i needed to make a gas giant for a cinematic trailer im working on, and this is just perfect for it!
For anyone wondering how to convert Dimension values to Roughness values, Setup the nodes as listed
e(AKA 2.71828)^(Input(Dimension)*-0.693147)
Set this up in a node group and it should be as close to exact as you can get with blender, values gotten from using tables in Desmos, the value from the power node should be the roughness from the dimension.
... what does this even mean
Hope you keep making good content
Thanks dawg! 🪐
Just found your channel - you are awesome dude. I'm an astrophysicist trying to make some educational materials and your tutorials are damn awesome.
BRUH. Blender aside, all this is created by math. Which means... it's computable. The program just helps to visualize it but damn! Insanely realistic and complex planet surface is a bunch of equations... Insane video, thanks. Now on to the Black Holes video :D
It is awesome! This video definitely deserves more Like and view count! Finding the correct parameter value need tons of time, but the author is willing to shared them on the youtube. I really appreciate that.
I always had trouble finding the right tutorial to learn blender. This is awesome 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Dude this guy has some of the best blender tutorials. Makes me sad the channel isn't that known. I followed this tutorial and its amazing. I also added some moons infront of the planet using your previous video about procedural planets. Keep up the great job!!!
Diamonds are rare.... if khajit has coins
_wait what_
Man you are the only reason my worldbuilding project and ksp planet pack still has planet renders to work with lol
Lol, thanks, love KSP content as well! 🚀
video summary: this may look finished, BUT *proceeds to make it even more amazing*
anyways jokes aside i did this on my pc and it looked amazing! thank you for this amazing tutorial
LETS GO YOU MADE IT!! bruh ur just actually an amazing youtuber
Thank you so much! 🪐
Thanks for another fire tutorial buddy! 💥
Thanks man! Glad you like it!
This is absolutely professional and top notch. I am SO happy someone finally was able to figure out the vector maths to get those curls and shared it for everyone to use! That was the key, the wall to surpass, and now it's an open road for everyone :D
rely cool tutorials man! Keep going. sadly blender crashes for me in evee for some unknown reason when I plug in the node groups, but I enjoyed the tutorial anyway, thank you so much.
For far higher performance (up to *5X faster render*, but limited functionality and detail), here's how to bake the texture:
First generate the UVs (if not generated already). I just split the cube into 24 equal regions (4 per face), they can all be completely separated. This way I maximize the texture space, covering most of the square image with the UVs.
The procedural shader uses 3 grayscale inputs to drive the texture: one for the saturation, another one to drive the color ramp, and another one to be mixed with the color multiply node. Take those 3 values and combine them with a combine xyz node, and connect that node to the final shader output.
Select the planet object, then in the material add an image texture node. Create a new image. A 2k resolution was enough for my use case. Disable alpha, and enable 32-bit float (This is to enable values higher than 1, for the saturation. You can also use a normalized saturation and re-map it from the baked texture). Set the color space to non-color.
In the bake settings, select Emit as the bake type. In my case, it works with "Selected to active" unchecked. With the object and the image node selected, hit bake. If the bake takes too long, you can cancel it and the resulting image will probably still be fine.
Now save the resulting image, split the color into XYZ and use each output to drive the saturation, color, and color multiply mix respectively. The result should be exactly the same as with the procedural shader (at a limited detail), but should render MUCH faster.
In my case it went from 10 min to 2 min. A 5X reduction. Reducing the volume max steps also helps (from 2 min to 1.5). At 256 steps the difference is unnoticeable but it can also be compensated by increasing the density.
No need for UVs, not for the source and not for the target. For the source, just setup an equirectangular panoramic camera in the center of the (non tilted) planet and render out the emission using a minimum of samples. For the target, use an environment map node using the generated texture, but invert the x value.
Unless you *need* proper volumetrics for closeups, atmospheric haze can be faked using a layer weight/falloff gradient multiplied with the direction to the lightsource normal driving an emission mix.
I'd just output the colors as regular 8bit. Combining the RGB data into whatever manipulation data you need can be done on the target, this isn't what makes this setup super slow, it's the amount of high detail generators. 32 bit float at 8-16k resolution as a 1000 frame sequence would take up immense amount of space for no good reason.
Wow. Just WOW! As others have mentioned this is one of the best space render tutorials out there. Clear and easy to follow with amazing results. Thank you!
This is lit
An outstanding technique and tutorial. Agreed on plain looking gas giants - also guilty of such, but that's before I saw this tutorial. I will have to think about the maths much harder - not one of my better subjects! But thank you for this.
glad I found this channel.. awesome stuff man
Haven’t use blender in a while, im gonna try combining your rings and this video to make somewhat of a good render
Absolutely melted my pc trying to do this until i realised i could reduce the number of iterations and crank up the curl field scale. And as someone else also said rings would be a good challange, especially procedural gaps based on moon orbits and propellers/vertical structure shadows based on moonlets.
Also thank you so much for making this video, I've always been a bit disappointed with other procedural gas giant textures.
@@neonasheed4490 Of course, it also makes more sense if you watch Alaskan's Curl fields video.
To reduce the iterations you need to go to the gas giant's shader editor and open up the Curl Coordinates [Append This] group that has the large iterative grid (8 by 8 grid it looks like) of Curl Field.001 group nodes and instead of the output coming from the the last two Curl Field.001 nodes move it about halfway up and take the last two vector outputs from the nodes of the 4th row.
To crank up the curl field scale go to the Curl Intensity node next to the grid and just increase the value number to about 1.
@@Chappens may i know how to do this?
@@Chappens Legend, thank you
Amazing stuff man, easy to follow and understandable node setups, and the results look phenomenal. Glad I found your tutorials, most other tutorials are convoluted if they're procedural, or they require height maps. Amazing work!
Thank you mate! I'm really interested in making some random planets in Blender, and i couldn't ever figure out how to make realistic gas giants... :P
can you give the hex code for the color ramp that you used to color the sphere at 16:11 please?
because i tried a lot and it's not good
Great job! Can you sample a seed detail from the actual map of jupiter and not a noise, and then generate the higher details using noise? As in, it should look pretty identical at some level to the sampled map but still be characteristically procedural.
YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Ungrouped that little node out of curiosity, fnd I was just shocked out of that complex node system
P.S. My 4060 Pc cant handle such amount of nodes and there is no more musgrave texture in 4.2 (
Possible solution: th-cam.com/video/2Z75X_Jg8JQ/w-d-xo.html
Thanks for the tutorial but I am stuck early on, I have setup everything as you've done but when I get to the vector math node and set the values to .01 instead of creating bands mine just changes around the color values for the texture. Any idea what I could be doing wrong?
I had this same issue but solved it. Make sure to change the Z value in the vector math node to 1.0, it's 0.0 by default!
I'll check this, thank you so much or replying I had moved on and forgot about this :)@@harbingerdawn
this is just wild!
4:37 *Vordt of the Boreal Valley OST starts blasting*
Great video! Thanks for the blender file!
yes, curl fields.
Was just looking to see if Blender could do this.
Guess I'm subbing. Thanks.
Thanks for subscribing! And ya, Blender can do some crazy cool stuff
You sound like Cartesian Caramel, awesome tutorial.
Your renders remind me of melodysheep! Btw what's your render settings? Bc when I try to render my planet scene, it always looks shit even tho it looks right from the preview
Thank you! I love Melodysheep as well! For render settings, 64 render samples and everything else is the same as the viewport (I show the settings at the start of the tutorial)
23:10 Technically for 100% realism the power should be ~2.718 (e, Euler's number) since atmospheric density falloff with height follows a natural logarithm.
as some one who doesn't knows anything abouth Blender, it was hard... but damn hard. Even though worth it!
Learned a lot in this tutorial. Thanks for that! 🙂🙃😉
Great tutorial as always, it looks incredible . But could you also create a tutorial for the rings of Gas giants? Like Saturns rings
I’m gonna put together a video covering procedural rings and moons for either next week or the week after 🪐
I cannot seem to get past around the 15 minute mark without blender crashing. I've switched between EEVEE and cycles to prevent the crash but even when it doesn't crash I just get a non luminated black sphere that does not react to lighting at all. I've redone the tutorial from the beginning up to that part about 3 times now and its just a black ball. Good learning material overall though thanks.
Dope!
is the map range node turning the model purple for anyone else?
For some reason, right from the start I'm not getting the same results you are as I follow the tutorial. I've watched the first 10 minutes of the tutorial about 7-8 times, and I'm following the exact same steps but the musgrave texture looks completely different, and then when I get to the banding effect, I need to have the Curl Base musgrave scale to 0.0000 in order for it to create the same banding effect. But then once I switch it out with the noise texture, it goes back to looking completely different.
Was there anything that got changed in the drive files? Because even when I just open that file and do the same process, instead of appending, I'm getting completely different results (ie the musgrave texture from the very start has a lot of much more smaller warps and lines in it, rather than larger pools as shown in your video)
Yeah, I'm having the same problem too. I can't work it out for the life of me.
Don't know why it does this, but got it fixed when I switched the vector math node to something else and then back to Multiply. For some reason the bottom value was reset to 0. When I set it back to 1, it was bak on track. Possibly a bug in Blender.
thankyou so much man! I admire you!
ayy broo u r epic fr
5:23 didnt get it can someone explain?
naht working.. using the exact same values doenst get near the proper looking in blender 4.01 probably some heavy twiking is needed musgrave just get some very dark streakes and half interrupted curls, maybe some review is advisable but if anyone got the same problems and got any luck fidling with the node gods and want to share some light it would be very appreciated
Make sure the Z value in the vector math node is set to 1.0
mine took 2 hours to get to 42 samples but that might be because I had Minecraft on in the background with out knowing
Amazing 😳
For some reason whenever I try to use your node it completely freezes my blender and slows down my desktop, I don't understand why it doesn't seem like it should be happening with this set up, anyone can help?
It is a hefty node setup. That's the unfortunate trade-off with using iterative functions.
Dude, you're awesome. Thanks for your tutorial... I just installed Blender!
Do you think you can make a tutorial for planets with rings and / or a star like sun?
I would love to learn doing them with you way if explaining.
Gonna do a tutorial on rings and moons next!
@@AlaskanFX I'll be here waiting! :)
are we able to download the textures as a map of the planet?
Okay I love the way you talk through these tutpria;ls, but *please* don't zoom artound the node trees so quick/zoomed in, it makes it really hard to follow (or at least for me :D )
Beautiful and amazing. Two thumbs up for this procedural solution.
Great tutorial
It is not working for me. When i download and append the nodes, Blender keeps crashing and my entire computer freezing
How did he do the animation where you can see light moving around the black hole?
DUDE THIS IS FUCKING INCREDIBLE! I'm totally subscribing, holy shit.
Quick question: So, for modding planets into Kerbal Space Program, you basically need to have a projection of the planet's surface that's a 2x1 rectangle. I was wondering if there was any way to make a procedural planet in Blender and then export the surface as a png.
Thank you! I love KSP as well! To get an image texture from the procedural one you'll need to bake the procedural texture to an image. It's not too hard and there's a bunch of tutorials on TH-cam if you look up "baking procedural textures in Blender"
@@AlaskanFX Okay, sweet! Thank you!
very nice - now let's animate it please :D
maybe with flow maps or something
Help, when I put in a sun light it doesn’t light the object, it lights the background.
How do we tone down the detail? Most of the renders are appearing too sharp using his video settings. I tried resetting the global output>color management>look to very low contrast which sort of works but then makes the sun's shadows too sharp and the rings need to have more contrast too (I'm working on a ringed gas giant using this video in combination with his one on rings).
Let me tell you something I will admit this is really cool it was a bit jumpy however, I was still able to follow a bit and… The only thing is… This is too cool to detailed. I crashed my computer.😂😂😂😂 like I had to switch from three viewport to just the shader tab and the minute I switched back to make sure the colors were OK blender just closed😭 unfortunately, I don’t think my computer is strong enough to handle this level of detail. But thank you for sharing anyway
Hide everything in the scene before you switch to the shader tab. Then make sure to click into rendered view once you’re in the shader tab. By default it is set to material view which for some reason requires a lot more computing power to than rendered view
Great tutorial, thank you!!
yes thank you
3:22 how did you do that (im still new to blender)
I've managed to successfully replicate it, and it looks good and renders fast on the viewport. However when I actually try to render a final image, the render time is really long. My render settings are like yours at the beginning of the video.
I have the same issue, like 3 hours for me on a 1080p photo
I tryied multiple times but the nodes are not showing in the render preview, I change them and nothing happens ... :(
Good Tutorial(Video) frome a very good YT
Its probably somthing I did horribly wrong but render times are estimating like 3 hours for a 1080p photo and I have no idea whats causing it
is it possible to use a procedual heightmap for some height diffrence? Could add even more detail
When I add another node after the musgrave texure in the curl base, the texture becomes pink. What should I do?
i had this problem too and i dont know how to we fix it :,)
@@kerkeniz9286 I still don't know how to fix it 🥲
Amazing tutorial man! But I have a problem with the texture maybe. Everytime I want to paste the object with the texture to another blend file, blender crashes. Even if I try to open the file again where I created it crashes. Wow it's only craches when I'm in the material view, which is pretty strange. Why is that how do I fix this?
Unfortunately there’s a problem with material view and Eevee. The material causes Blender to crash if you enter either mode with the material visible. No idea of a fix is in the works or what but for a janky fix you can bake the texture in Cycles then just use the image texture in Eevee and without worrying about material view
thank you :D@@AlaskanFX
Question: If i wanted to do a simple animation on the gas clouds could I just mess with the combine xyz inside the texture Z mapping node? Also great work as always 🙏🚀
You can try that if you want but animating the curl intensity is the best way to do animations. And if you want the animation to be able to run for longer the best way is to duplicate the whole texture and oscillate between two of them with one half offset as this guy does: th-cam.com/video/KfphtLRoUB0/w-d-xo.html&feature=sharea
And thanks for the compliment! :)
You’re a LEGEND TY! 🐐🐐🐐
what blender version are you using, i failed to complete your blackhole tutorial because i was missing specific things that u had and i didn't, and here im missing the masgrave texture at 6:22
The musgrave texture is now included in the noise texture, everything works the same though
Merci beaucoup pour ta vidéo ! :)
Can someone tell me how to better get results like the ones he has posted at his ArtStation or even the video frame used for this video? I do end up with a Jupiter like featured in the video, but it's a bit too detailed and some of the banding is odd and sort of looks like it has hair spikes. Also, I have great difficulties trying to color the result with the gradient, just seems to plain and I cannot reproduce the color, detail, or smoothness like he feature in his results outside of the video. Also, the actual Saturn he uses for the rings at ArtStation is different than the one in the ringed vid. Too bad he doesn't make the .blend files avail for both his finalized Jupiter and Saturn.
for sum reason i get a rlly spotty white, grey n black snowball on 4.2.3
Can this be made with Eevee?
is there any way to animate the effect? i'd like to animate the gasses on the planet to make a short video
This doesn't work, the texture is wayyyyy to liquidy and noisy, is this on a older version of blender? I have to lower the musgrave and noise texture scales WAY down to how it looks at 5:30 and the curl intensity doesn't do anything. I've done this twice and both times this happens.
I did it in Blender 4.0 (beta), followed each step and got the exact same result. Make sure you begin with an object without a modified scale. The initial mesh should be a sphere of radius 1 (diameter/dimensions = 2m), and must have its scale applied (from the start). Some parameters may produce unnoticeable changes when modified, but may affect other stuff later on.
wow
HEHEH gonna usethis for saturn moon sie comparison
Jupiter impresionante.
An updated version of this should be made, it can still work but the removal of Musgrave textures breaks alot of it with the fixes being quite tedious and/or risky.
Still a great tutorial though
Huh....okay this is weird.
It worls fine in rendered preview and of course in solid mode. But if i yry to clock to wore frame or material preview, blender instantly crashes
This is an issue with Blender. Material preview is weird and some more complex setups will crash Blender because of it
@@AlaskanFX aww, boo :(
However its shaping up nicely when I put a spaceship in there (even if I can't quite get the atmosphere looking right :D )
For some reason when I add the map range node around 7:30 my texture goes purple and never changes back. Everything seems to be fine the second I delete the node. Does anyone know how I could fix this?
BTW I love your tutorials. Keep it up!
I have the same problem. Just deleted the node and everything seems fine
Just solved the problem you can't view the texture in the material preview you can only view it in rendered view
Thank you so much for letting me know!@@thewatchman0_o39
@@thewatchman0_o39 Thanks !!!
Adding map range everything turns pink.
Figured out you have to be on cycles and in rendered mode for this to work.
Is there any way to add a great red spot?
Maybe locationally changing the texture scale, to decrease it in a position that has a normal sized spot... that location would have to be manual (map the scale to from 1, to a custom value, using the dot product between the normal and the direction of the spot as input value), and I'm not sure if the resulting deformation would look good.
Now has come the time to put all of these tutos in one scene. 4070TI I do not care! Just append as objects?
Should work! Or you can put everything you want to append into a collection and just append that and it’ll work for sure. Good luck btw!
@@AlaskanFX Thanks bro ! you're the best. Last question and since you hate render questions haha I'm not sure about the node for the gaz giant to put my keys on. 😢
@@lupinlapin You'll wanna animate the curl intensity a bit then just animate the planet's rotation for a good effect
@@AlaskanFX Clever ! Thanks so much ! Your greatest fan here!