How to create a Saturn ring?

Question

Hi,
I am looking for ideas how to make really high detailed planet Saturn rings? I thought of using blender to create a flat cylinder then to multiply that but does anyone have other suggestions or ways of approaching this?
What about debris? make 1000’s of objects could gpu expensive, I wonder how that can be approached?

Aggarwal

how close in to the rings are you going to get? 1000's of debris objects WOULD make sense, and possibly be necessary, if you were flying around INSIDE the rings. If viewed from a distance, I would think a disk/cylinder mesh, with a partially transparent texture would be the way to go. If both are needed, you probably want to implement it both ways. All too often a scheme that works for one situation just wont work well for another. Do you need to put a planetary shadow on the rings too?

– Redware

Yeah, I think you can even get away with a simple plane mesh with an alpha-masked ring texture on it if collision is no issue. Then, when you get near to it, you could instantiate debris prefabs as chunks at the part of the ring you are at.

– Sennight

Thanks for the replies! Do you know of a good source of where I can get high resolution images for planet rings?

– Aggarwal

Answer 1

I haven’t tried modeling Saturns rings but here are some suggestions on how you could proceed. The solution is meant to be LOD controlled, so at long range only a texture is drawn and at close range more advanced representations may be used.

At long view range, a simple textured flat box (quad) would probably be enough.

If you get closer, consider swapping or transitioning (blending) into a more detailed representation, perhaps volumetric flat toruses, where you render the back side of the torus and the front side of the torus in separate passes. From this, calculate the depth distance between the front and back fragments. This will give the illusion that the discs/rings have volume (they are about 10 meters in thickness from what I heard).

If you get very close, or inside the disc, consider swapping or transitioning to a particle system to represent finely ground space rocks.

Finally, consider using geometry shaders to render multiple larger rocks if you can’t figure out another way to add variation.

I don’t know about ring dynamics over time, it might be possible to add more advanced effects to the rings but you’d have to research that (for example, Jupiter got a vortex, Saturn got the hexagon pole, maybe the rings have some similar effect that would be cool to simulate).

Blizzard

Answer 2

hey,
i had the same prob as i started to make a space game. after a while i found this very helpful tutorial how to build saturn and its rings ! with Blender. with links to NASA to get textures of the saturn rings and how to texturize it
( them )

Design & Illustration Envato Tuts+

How to Create a Saturn Infographic With Blender and Inkscape

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create this “photo-realistic” cutaway Saturn illustration in pure SVG. We will use the open source 3D graphics software Blender to produce a physically...

its a bit late to answer but hopefully helpful in future for others !

the picture shows my “result”

yours

Yolandayolande

Answer 3

I think i can make a saturn ring, but it’s using code. Also first create new object call line renderer, Then it has to be a point, so create new object call sphere, let’s make a code call “Ellipse”, Then Create script that the line renderer draw like and Ellipse, then save it, and Done!..

First let’s create a variable but using public like an r1, r2, step, the Transform is point, and the LineRenderer is lr…
Learn about like Line Renderer: How To Draw a Line in Unity | Line Renderer Tutorial 1 - YouTube
Then the script “Ellipse” is here:

step = 0;
lr.positionCount = 0;
for (int i = 0; i <= 360; i++)
{
    lr.positionCount++;
    lr.SetPosition(i, new Vector3(
        point.position.x + Mathf.Sin(step) * r1,
        3.146603f,
        point.position.z + Mathf.Cos(step) * r2
        ));
    step += 0.2f;
}

Then, put the script “Ellipse” into the line renderer…
Then, set up the script “Ellipse” like a r1, r2, step, point, and lr in the line renderer!
Then try to run it!

Edson

Answer 4

Can’t help it, have to post this:

image802×686 102 KB

This was done with physics in Unity. The green square is an attractor that the red spheres get pulled towards. But since they originally started with a velocity that put them on a trajectory that would have them miss the green cube, they started to do the most natural thing: orbit.

The red spheres that hit the surface got deflected out of orbit by collision with other spheres.

This is how you make a saturn ring, physics-style.

Limit