Physical Celestial Objects

Breathtaking real-scale planets in a single click

Physical Celestial Objects lets you create physically accurate planets on a real scale with just a few clicks.

• Add celestial bodies
• Choose how the planet looks by setting image Textures (Albedo, Roughness, Height map, Emission)
• Set the radius and rotation
• Position planet using either
  • Global position (x, y, z)
  • Relative to the viewer (distance, azimuth, elevation)
  • Elliptical orbit (select another planet, object, or point to orbit around)
• Enable Atmosphere and adjust the settings
• Enable Rings

No compromise precision
You are free to scale up your planets using real-world measurements and distances without having to worry about precision loss, z-flighting, and shadow distances.

Cinematic Atmosphere
Our atmosphere is built with a multi-layer system in mind. You can individually assign properties to each layer to build your own unique atmospheres. Our physics based ray-marcher takes care of mixing it all together.

Procedural Rings
Planetary rings can be customized to build eye-catching worlds. Rings interact with the atmosphere and the planet surface - cast shadows and indirect light.

Lighting and Shadows
Our planet surface lighting model is based on ‘Hapke BRDF’ - specifically designed for celestial bodies. Physically accurate raytraced soft shadows are cast from planets. Indirect light bounces from lit parts of planets. Improved bump map that brings extra detail to the planet.

Lights up your scene
Our addon is calculated in World node shader that automatically acts as environment light and illuminates your scene without having to add fake lights manually.

Intuitive Planet Positioning
When you work in celestial sizes, intuitive positioning is a must. You can position planets using Orbital, global, or viewer transform.

Saves time
This addon saves hours that usually are invested in solving issues that come up when you decide to create planetary-scale worlds.

Made by professionals
We have more than a decade of experience with atmosphere rendering techniques in the computer graphics industry. Our first product - ‘Physical Starlight and Atmosphere’ is used in the entertainment, film, automotive, aerospace, and architectural visualization industries.

Our products are used by industry leaders

Ben Mauro

Senior Concept Artist at 343 Industries

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere has been an invaluable tool for me in my personal/professional work and a huge missing link for lighting in Blender. It still feels like magic every time I use it, I can't recommend it highly enough!

James Tralie

Planetary Science Producer and Animator at NASA

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere has been an essential add-on for all of my environmental design projects. It gives me such incredibly flexibility and control over the look and feel of my renders. Lighting is key for any project, and this add-on always gives my work that extra edge.

Scott Warren

Senior Lighting Artist at Turtle Rock Studios

As a lighting artist, focusing on the overall mood of an image is super important. Physical Starlight and Atmosphere is based on reality, so I can spend all of my time iterating on the look without worrying about how to achieve it.

FAQ:

Q: Which rendering engines are supported?
A: Cycles and Eevee.

Q: Why bump texture doesn’t look as good as in the promotional video?
A: Change height map Color Space from ‘sRGB’ to ‘Linear’ or ‘Non-Color’.

Q: Are textures included in the addon?
A: In the download file we provide links for publicly available open-source textures from sources such as NASA etc. (texture quality varies from 100KB to 1GB)

The science behind PCO

Celestial objects are raytraced analytical spheres. This rendering approach is less prone to precision errors at extremely large distances and immense scales. They also interact with each other - cast penumbra shadows and contribute to indirect light.

Planets use a simplified form of Hapke BRDF. It makes them look ‘velvety’ at grazing angles. For water worlds, we implemented GGX Specular distribution model. Rings, atmospheres, and real surface displacement are in the concept phase and will be introduced once the rocky planets are fully functional. Indirect lighting is based on analytical spherical area light.

Rings contribute to indirect light, rings are lit by planets, and planets are lit by rings. A large portion of our time is invested in sorting functions - to sort and mix opaque and semi-transparent objects. The process is automated whenever you add a new celestial object.