Hello everyone! We have something new for you and it’s out of this world! We have been working on the Desert Planet and we cannot wait to share it with you. The Desert Planet is on an alien frontier world designed by artist Kamaal Manboard.
The scene is a sea of brown sand and stone-like structures with a city built by a human colony in the background. The inspiration behind this world came from NASA’s Mars Rover project, scheduled to launch in 2020. If we were to take up residence on a new frontier, the we believe it would look like our Desert Planet.
How did we make the Desert Planet?
“We modeled the world with Blender3D and Cinema4D, and textured with Photoshop. According to Kamaal, “The scene uses normal mapping for the rocks extensively. This scene also has a sky box, generated from the 3D environment.”
Kamal Manboard
The Sky Box
Jahshaka uses cubemaps for sky rendering. Rather than finding a skybox online, Kamaal created one in Cinema4D using a model for the ground and cloud textures on planes for the skies. He captured the six sides of the skybox using six individual cameras. The entire process warrants writing a whole tutorial by itself, the results were worth the effort however.
The City
We added a city texture to a plane and applied a special unlit material to create the city that is in the background. Jahshaka’s default material shader doesn’t allow for alpha blending, so the developers had to create a special shader. That new shader will be bundled in the new 5.1 release.
The Water
We added other cool aspects to the world like the river. This was basically a flat plane, shaped like a river with the water shader added to it. We used the water Shader before in our Lobby Scene and we brought it back for this one.
One pretty cool aspect of the new World is the steam. We used Jahshaka’s particle system to make it. There are aspects that need improvement; nevertheless, there are a variety of effects that our particle system can be used to do.
Here is the particle texture and settings used:
You can download the Desert Planet now by clicking the following link
That’s all for now with this scene. Go to our downloads section to view and download more virtual worlds, assets and materials. Keep updated with all things Jahshaka by visiting our website’s news section. And for more information on Jahshaka, you can follow us on Twitter @jahshakafx and like us on Facebook at Jahshakafx.