Living planet surfaces?

Hi! I wonder if anyone has any thoughts or recommendations to give on how to bring life to planet surfaces?

I'm thinking like the cloud turbulances on Uranus and Saturn. The movie 2010 give s a pretty good visual clue (when the red spot is being gobbled up) but really I'm just looking for that kind of foaming cloud interaction as a way to bring life to a pretty static texture when in very very close proximity to a high res planet object.

I currently have a number of the planetary assets and they can do atmospheres but nothing to that level of effect - and I was wondering if I could do it with shaders or maybe even a cloud generator?

is there anything out there that might work that exists in the asset store etc.. or a demonstration that could be adapted and applied?


edit for example: Imagine the rolling effect of these in motion - to give you an idea...

 

Try flowmap.

 

this

 

also found this which I think is quite impressive
http://www.shaderslab.com/demo-13---lava-with-flow-map.html

 

Another approach- You could also experiment with using particle systems. You could render the particle system to render texture and then use the render texture for the planet's surface. Potentially, you could create an effect with some depth which might look more realistic at the right scale.

 

This sounds really good - but from scratch it requires far more skill than I have. Im kind of looking ofr examples or assets that can already do this with minimum fuss

 

To be honest, I'm not real good with particle effects either. I tend to use AssetStore packs. If you can find one you like, though, the render-texture part is trivially easy.

 

@rmorph
I did something like that years ago.
But what I did, (this is the tough route) was that I made a planet texture in photoshop, and then I took my time, and animated it in photoshop. I will admit it is kinda tough to do sometimes, but it gets gets easier, as you do it more often.

But for your case, an animated texture might do this job well.

I know this is an old topic, but I made this post, so others can see other ways to accomplish this effect. Since obviously, others might be going through, this same problem too.