Creating Saturn Rings?

Deke

Any idea on how to create a ring of particles? I'm trying to use the Blue Planet earth model but with an added futuristic ring of paricles (sattelites). Setting up a torus is easy enough, but I'm after particles, not a solid. Or is this a job for After Effects?

kaotkbliss

If you have an image of debris (such as from Ron's explosions for example) you can place that on your taurus as a material, then take the same image into photo program and make it a black and white image, then invert the colors and save it with a new name. Then take your new image and place it in the cutout opacity for iray or just opacity for 3delight.

 

There might be a shader to produce the same effect, but I haven't messed with shaders

Deke

That sounds promising. Can you apply a material to a torus?  With Torus highlighted, all I see under materials are Lights.  And no Iray mats.

kaotkbliss

Click on the surfaces tab than it's the little down arrow next to the color under diffuse (or base color for iray) select browse from the dropdown and search your pc for the image you want to use on the torus.

Deke

That helps.  What would really help is if I could make this torus emmissive.   Why won't Iray give me that option?

kaotkbliss

select the torus, then select the torus again in the surfaces tab, then double click to apply the iray shader base. Scroll down to emmissive and select a color and lumen strength.

SpottedKitty

Deke said:

That helps.  What would really help is if I could make this torus emmissive.   Why won't Iray give me that option?

Are you looking in the folder of Iray shader presets that you get as part of the free content? There's one named "Emissive" that does exactly what you want. Note that you should apply the material after doing this, the Emissive preset resets everything and doesn't take account of any texture you might have already applied.

Charlie Judge

Here are textures for Saturn's rings: http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/saturn.php Maybe you could apply them to a flattened torus.

Edited to add: Sorry, I didn't read closely and realize you wanted particles. However, I'll leave the link in case someone else is interested. The celestial Motherlode is still a great soure of planetary maps and textures.

Deke

Still working out some kinks but was able to make the rings by applying a jpg material to a torus. Later colored and effected in AE. Can you add video to this forum?  Here's the link.

https://www.facebook.com/dale.kutzera/videos/10208410645724578/?l=9106856082708915460