Tutorial on how to make planets
Introduction: Ever been sitting there, at your computer, playing a great game like Solar Conquest or Space Explorers, or even Build your Spaceship and go Explore, and you started wondering just how they made those big planets? Well, now you can put your questions and misconceptions to rest with this tutorial.
What is a planet, on roblox?
Essentially, a planet is a big mesh, with a large brick inside the middle serving as the surface. So, when you are walking on Wanwood or Javion, if you’re near the middle of the surface, you might be standing on the very bricks that make up the “atmosphere” of the planet.
How do I make the atmosphere, exactly?
First, you need to get a brick with a SpecialMesh in it, several actually (if you don’t know about meshes, see my tutorial on meshes from my group page, FrogTech Corp: Elite Builders). You should stack them, one on top of the other, but their y scale (height) needs to be very small, as small as you can get it (do this by changing the brick’s FormFactor to “Custom”). Once done, change all of the meshes’ MeshIDs to the web address for planets (just insert a planet off of the free models and copy and paste the MeshID of the atmosphere into yours. Your bricks should now look like squashed spheres all stacked up. You need to change the Transparency of all the bricks except one to anything that’s a decimal (0.4 or 0.3 should work, depending on how many layers you want). The solid looking sphere will be the outer atmosphere, the one that makes the planet recognizable. The others will be inner atmospheres. Change the Scale of the outer atmosphere to however big you want your planet to be, experiment, but all three values, x, y, and z must all be the same. Then, THIS IS THE KEY PART, THE ONE PEOPLE WONDER ABOUT, change the Scale of all the other meshes to slightly larger than the outer atmosphere, but MAKE THE X VALUE NEGATIVE. This will cause you to see the inside of the sphere, instead of the outside, so it appears that you are actually inside an atmosphere when on the surface of the planet. Then you just make the surface platform as big as you want it (ALL bricks throughout the entire process should be ANCHORED). And that’s it. You’re done.
How do I customize how the atmosphere looks?
You can make a textured atmosphere by changing the texture of the brick the atmosphere is made from, or copy and paste the TextureID of a decal from the decal to your mesh.