18
$\begingroup$

I was watching the Create a Realistic Earth tutorial by Andrew Price and I was able to follow along in Cycles until I hit the part where he mixes the day and night materials together so that the lights show up on the "dark side" of the earth.

How can I recreate this effect in cycles? I thought I could use the ray information to tell me if there was incoming light but I've found no such node to give me this information.

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
1

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
12
$\begingroup$

I have made a little shader that does this. See below for the node setup and a test render.

First there are two shaders, one for the ground (green-brown-noise) and one for the glowing city lights.

Second, there is a mask for the city lights that makes them appear as spots.

Third, and this is answering your question, a value calculated as the dot product between the normal of the planet surface and the vector from the light source to the planet. Very simplified, dot product does this: If they point in the same direction, the dot product will be 1. If they point in opposite direction, dot product is 0. It was a loong time since I studied linear algebra so don't sue me over this.

Fourth, the second mask is multiplied with the third and this is fed as a factor into the mix node that mixes the two materials (land vs city lights).

Node setup. Note how I had to manually calculate the vector for the dot product. In this case (my planet is at 0, 0, 0) it is only the negative value of the light source position.

node setup

Test render:

test render

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
3
  • $\begingroup$ Great answer :) As a small note, this is also possible using multiple renderlayers in compositing, however this solution is far nicer. $\endgroup$
    – gandalf3
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 23:17
  • $\begingroup$ Dot product is actually 0 when perpendicular and -1 when parallel but pointing the opposite direction, i believe. $\endgroup$
    – Weaver
    Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 10:18
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ No one seems to hardcode dot products in shaders here :D Dot product = lengthA x lengthB x cosine(AB). So for normalized vectors, lengthA x lengthB = 1. The cosine then varies from 1 (same direction) to -1 (opposite directions), 0 being perpendicular vectors. In Blender cycles normals are normalized as in every engine, so using a non normalized vector of length L for light source makes your result stand between L (same direction) and -L (opposite directions). Since Blender uses factors from 0 to 1 the dot product showed here is automatically clamped between those values, so it works :) $\endgroup$
    – Mouloud85
    Commented Jan 18, 2016 at 17:29
2
$\begingroup$

cycles nodes to mix based on incoming light cycles nodes to mix based on incoming light

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
2
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ Please do not rely only on pictures. Posts need text. $\endgroup$
    – David
    Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 13:25
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ "cycles nodes to mix based on incoming light" Also this is not based on incoming light, it is based on Lamp object position actually $\endgroup$
    – Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦
    Commented Feb 26, 2020 at 16:46
0
$\begingroup$

I have got the same problem, and tried to solve ot this way using normal map node. Be careful with displacement, because it changes the normal map

enter image description here

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .