Procedural Asteroid Rings

Inner and Outer Radius control the shape of the asteroid ring.

The patterns in asteroid rings are built by sampling a detailNoise texture assigned by default to each Procedural Asteroid Shader. As an advanced user, you can plug your own textures here to get different patterns.

Lighting Override

The 2.1.2 update has added a variant asteroid ring shader, that exposes properties to control the way light interacts with the object.

• LightFalloffSharpness is a value that sits at a default of 0 for a Lit object, and increasing it makes the transition from light to dark when the directional light changes rotation sharper.
• MinBrightnessLevel determines how dark the ring gets when the light faces away from it.
• MinShadowBrightnessLevel determines how dark the ring gets when it is in the shadow of another object.
• The final two toggles are multi-compile boolean keywords necessary for the shader to receive shadows - they can be turned off to improve performance if shadows are not necessary.

Two Sided Lighting

Consider the following situation with the light hitting the asteroid ring on the opposite side of the viewer:

The ring is unlit - very dark - the light value determined by the MinBrightnessLevel property.

But with TwoSidedLighting enabled, we get the absolute lighting value - thereby making it look as if the ring is illuminated from below.

Advanced Effects

You can use two asteroid rings on the same parent gas giant to get a more varied effect:

The ring is composed of two overlapping asteroid ring meshes, with the inner ring's outer radius slightly smaller than the outer ring's inner radius (repeat that 5 times, ha!).