Interactive planet-creation tutorial

[Ozylot]

Fantastic!

[aszazeroth]

Thanks guys.... and yeap as Lennier1 said... this has been a long journey and it is not over yet

[aszazeroth]

Sometimes you just gonna have to look what your planet might look like in a render. Quickie with an old (only 8k) cloudmap and the famous alpha as them specular-mask. No bump and most noticeably no land-specular, which usually liven up the continents and make the land less flat looking. Tweaked the atmosphere to a more green-ish hue due to well, more oxygen or something quasi-physics like that.

Enjoy


Fig 9.1 Another test-render

//Dr. Asz

[aszazeroth]

Some starters on the bump-map then. Still very general stuff and mostly filter-ized. I used the alpha to select the landmasses, new layer, and dropped a inner-glow layer effect. This will then be the overall coastal line profile, in my case inspired by some nice photos of Aussie coast. Unfortunately my darn PS crashed on me so I have no screencaps, but towards the bottom of the inner-glow there is a profile selector that also let's you configure your own profile. So I made a shoreline-steep as h3ll slope-flat top kindof profile. Add some jitter to that for a jagged appearance and make sure you choose white instead of egg-shell-yellow that's default. Apply and if you are working 8k or above... go for a coffe. So now you have the beginnings of a funky bump map. I then added (still land selected) some "cloud+diff cloud x4" render. That adds some perlin inspired ridges. Then I blended in a contrast enhanced colormap and desaturated the whole thing. Ready for a test drive.


Fig 10.1 Test drive of the rudimentary bump-map.

For all intended purpose, I guess we can stop here if we just want orbital, full planet shots..... but where is the fun with that The next phases are the ones that adds "human" decided detail to the map, where I intend to break away from the filter generated look and start exploring the world, below.

Cheers
//Dr.Asz

[I will try go back and take some screenshots later]

[backstept]

truespace can't handle 8k sized maps like you're working with so I've been doing it 4096 by whatever

for my planet I used a couple big textures and faded one on top of the other at 50% opacity to sortof combine them and set that as a pattern stamp
the textures I used were metal crystals (like a sheet of steel) and ground (dirt, leaves, branches, dead wood etc)
I'm at school now, but when I have time to work on it I'll use different base patterns for the different climate regions

[Ozylot]

Damn thats beautiful. Im gonna have to do some stuff to keep up with this.

[backstept]

Originally Posted by Ozylot

Damn thats beautiful. Im gonna have to do some stuff to keep up with this.

ditto

[aszazeroth]

Especially for Backstept... my first ever 3D planet render...

Arrakis, Truespace 2-something

[backstept]

nice

my first ever planet render was using the default windows 95 clouds desktop mapped on a sphere, and I also used the same tex as a bump map, so the clouds appeared miles and miles high
then I blurred the whole thing because I thought it was too much, so I was left with a blue blurry mess
haha
I'll see if I can post it later

[Tinukedaya]

Alright. After a LONG time I found myself trying to finnish my planet again. Although after loosing my patience when waiting 5 second to every action to appear, I had to decrease the res of the map to just 4k.

Now i'm in the stage when I trying to reproduce the Decks tutorial and I found out I do not have any suitalbe Cloud map. I thought abot making me one, but the reslts were no good. So, Asz... think you might give us some hints? I guess you are doing them alone as well eh?

Thanks in advance... If I find the WIP thread that was associated with this tut, i shall post my result so far.