Gas Giant
 

I have a shot that I believe will be highly difficult and will need help to create.

A giant space ship (550 m long), heavily damaged, will drift into the atmosphere of a gas giant, accellerating due to the giants gravity. It will then spurt its engines a bit and change course during its fall, crashing onto a huge platform inside the giants atmosphere (the platform's diameter could hold maybe 50 copies of the ships lengthwise). This is all ONE shot, which means the ability to see the gas giant as a sphere of clouds, then pushing into the atmosphere and being able to see INTO the giant. I expect that fluid effects are the way to go, but I have scale issues: It seems I can either have a zoomed-out pleasing giant or an in-the-atmosphere pleasing giant, but not both. Tips or ideas?

Play with focal length of the camera and see what kind of pov and parallax you get

J

Ooooh. Paralax is fun :)

I'd say getting really close to the ship with the camera and opening the fov could give some very disorienting effects, which would be along the lines of the drama I'm wanting to create.

It so happens that this is part of a larger scene. I'm still building the models, environment, and infrastracture, but
For building the planet, I was thinking... making several layers of spherical cloud-bank-preset-like fluid containers would be hugely taxing on the system to render.

Does it make sense to build a thick outer layer, and since the gas giant is so huge, building the other layers by small rectangular "cloud banks", or do you think you'd be able to tell that the clouds aren't wrapping?

I don't really understand what you're describing in your last post. If you're trying to create clouds around a planet, the easiest way would be to create a texture of clouds with a transparency map as well, then assign it to a larger sphere around the planet. This will create a convincing cloud cover. This is the way they do it in most video games. Creating many of these stacked on top of each other could create a sense of flying through them.

You can also, instead of using texture, create a shading network to procedurally generate the clouds. A tutorial can be found here: http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutori...hader-356.html

Sorry if I'm interpreting the question incorrectly. If you need any more help, don't hesitate to ask!

well, definitely looking for something that I can both fly through and look at from space. That's the problem. Sure, usually I'd just set up two scenes: one outside the atmosphere and one inside. But, I can't, since the transition from space to atmosphere is in the same shot. The shader tut is interesting, and I may be able to use it fore some of the cloud layers.

Director has changed his mind, is now going for a cut, which, incidentally makes my job a load easier.

Interior of the gas giant:

http://www.neopeng.com/gas_giant_interior.jpg

with untextured platform