If you start researching rendering realistic atmospheres for planets, the rabbit hole goes very deep. Having been on this particular dive a few times now, I figured it's time to actually publish some notes - partly for my own later reference, but hopefully also of use to others.

TL;DR

Right off the bat, if you just want to dive right in with a state-of-the-art atmosphere rendering technique, then go with A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique by Sébastien Hillaire. It is the same atmosphere rendering technique used by Unreal Engine, it is fast, scalable, has less edge-cases than previous approaches, and the author has made reference source code available.

On the other hand, if you have more specialised needs, or just want to go deeper on atmosphere rendering, then stick around...

I just posted a quick youtube video to demonstrate the current state of the planet renderer. This is early development stuff, and the eye candy is minimal, but it should give you some idea of the scope.

Part of the rationale behind this video is to streamline the whole video capture and posting process. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been entirely straightforward so far. I went through a number of video capture tools before settling on FRAPS, which works well enough (though I would have prefered a free tool).

I also have had a terrible time converting the video for youtube – ATI’s Avivo video converter is blazingly fast, but apparently produces an incompatibe audio codec in any of the high-quality settings. I was forced to fall back to the CPU-based Auto Gordian Knot, which both does a worse job, is very slow on my little Athalon 64 x2.

I am now experimenting with ffmpeg, but the command line options are confusing to say the least. If anyone has any clues/tips/tricks for getting FRAPS encoded video (and audio) into a suitable format for youtube HD, please let me know.