Creating our planet surface

Here we began to create the planet surface that would feature in our scene. We started off by inserting a simple plane in the project. Then, in order to achieved the aspired rocky planet texture we experimented with applying a created material, altering the noise types and levels in the displacement and bump settings. In the bump setting we applied several noise shaders such as standard noise, blistered turbulence,wavy turbulence, FBM, LUKA and voronoi 1. We also included a layer shader which allowed us to overlay and apply several noise types to the material.

 We realised that we also needed to lower some of the intensities of the noise types as the given effect was far to drastic and didn't achieve our intention of creating a realistic surface/landscape.

 After applying the noise in the bump settings we felt that we created a rather realistic texture, however we felt that the surface looked too flat. We then decided to experiment with the displacement levels in order to alter to physical shape of the flat plane. We once again tried different noise levels such as types like poxo, FBM and blistered turbulence. We also found a 'tiles' shader which applied a continuous pattern throughout the texture, and added topography.

We then had to turn down the intensity of the effect as we only wanted to make the surface slightly uneven and irregular and also implying a sense of depth. We also considered the colour of the surface and weighed up the outcomes. We felt that the orange surface looked too alienating and more like the surface or mars whereas a white/grey surface looked more like the moon and more familiar to the audience. Ultimately, we found a happy medium by eventually deciding to use the white/grey and an area light with a slightly warm colour tint. This light was very successful in making our scene look more atmospheric as I contributed to the contrast and highlighted the depth of the material applied to the plane. We positioned the light source fairly low to the surface in order to achieve hard shadows and turned down the intensity slightly to apply low key lighting. 

Progression of Planet Surface: