saturn texture map

Saturn is another oblate gas giant, like Jupiter. It is 10% shorter than it is wide — very visible to the eye when viewed through a telescope — so be sure to include this detail in your model. Its ring structure is a bit of a problem to render correctly as well. In Cinema4D I used a finely divided "plane" primitive, with a "bend" procedural object as its child. The plane object had the color and transparency maps applied to it with UV mapping so that when the bend object twisted it around into a 360° circle, the texture stuck to it and bent smoothly with the plane. A similar trick can be accomplished in Lightwave with morph targets.

This map was borrowed wholesale from Björn Jónsson's excellent map site, as I found his map based on Voyager data to be much superior to my own handpainted effort.

The color map for the rings was created by myself in Photoshop, using Björn Jónsson's Saturn ring map and a reference photograph of Saturn for a guide. Cinema4D has a shader for Saturn's rings built into the program, but I think the color bands produced by this map create a better result. The transparency map is also from Björn's site, but flipped horizontally to fit with Cinema4D's mapping peculiarities.