Planetary textures needed for 3D hobbyist Space Opera game

[AvengerDr]

Hello everyone,
I'm developing in my spare time a 3D 4x Space Opera game a-la Master of Orion, which I'm sure many of this forum's users will undoubtedly know. I was wondering if any of your texture artist would allow to use some of their textures in my game since I'm just a coder and have no skill whatsover. Mind you, I'm nowhere near completion, though. I just have developed the basic engine skeleton, a galaxy generation program (based on the "accrete" algorithm) and the framework for the GUI of the game.

Since I'd like to see "what happens" when I finally get to create the solar systems, I'd like to have at least a different texture set for each "Planet Type".. So I was wondering if any of you could contribute theirs

This is the level of quality I'm striving for:

(Side question: does it look "realistic" enough? I'm not sure whether to emphasize specular highlights on the planet surface)

The texture maps that I would need are:

• Diffuse Map
• Normal Map
• Cloud Map (if the planet has an atmosphere)

In the future I could need different nighttime diffuse map to show the "urbanization" progress on a colonized planet. So that when the user is vieweing the planet at night, the lights of the cities show up.

These are the different types of planet that I'm thinking of including

• Hadean (barren planet, whose atmosphere was completely frozen over - <80 °K surface Temp)
• Cerean (small planetoidal - similar to Ceres)
• Kuiperian (small planetoidal - Pluto)
• Glacial (rocky planet completely frozen with possibly some atmosphere, 80°K < surface Temp < 230°K)
• Ammonia (rare terrestrial planet with ammonia based lifeforms)
• Volcanic (europa like planet)
• Arean (mars like planet with possibily a thin atmosphere)
• Tundra (really cold terrestrial planet, Hoth?)
• Terran
• Ocean (planets with <20-30% of land)
• Arid (less "green" version of Earth, with smaller oceans)
• Desert (Arrakis!)
• Hephaestian (planets whose surface is complteley molten)
• Cytherean (Venus-like planets, with superdense atmosphere)
• Pelagic ("wet" greenhouse planets, like Venus, but whose atmosphere and temperature allow for vast oceans)
• Cataclismic ("special" category for planets that are dying or that are sufferying some sort of catastrophe. For example, how the earth would look from space, in the movie Matrix or Terminator)
• Gas Giants (various GasGiants textures)

Well I think I've covered most if not all categories.. (if you have other suggestions, please feel free to contribute). I hope to hear from you

Thanks for the attention!

[Don. Edwards]

If you are looking for realism, First I would do some editing of your present Earth Texture. If you want it to look as real as possible it needs to look more like this.



Also if what ever you are rendering your planets in can use a Specmap I highly recommend using one. Your render has a bright specular reflection over the land. not at all realistic.

As for the request for textures, if you go back through the forum you will tons of projects that have interesting textures that should fit your needs, just contact those texture artist and get their permission to use there works. I and several other texture creators have quite the collection in here in the forum. Its just going to take some legwork to find them and ask to use them or contact those artist and ask if they are interested in doing some of the work for you. A few years ago I would have jumped to help you out but I am far to busy with many of my own projects.
Good luck with your project and if you have any other questions just ask.

Don. Edwards

[AvengerDr]

Thanks for the reply! Actually the texture I used for the screenshot is your own one that I downloaded on the celestia website. Although not the "realistic one". I hope I can use it Anyway I was asking if it looked realistic because I'm really not sure how what it should look like. I've seen some photos of Earth (and Mars) rendering that showed big specular highlights on the oceans, as if you could see the sun reflected there. Is that realistic or no?

I modified my shader to account for the specular map (again I used your own one!) and changed the diffuse map to your "realisitc" one. This is the end result:



now the specular highlight seems to be gone and the continents seem to "stand out" more. But how do you create a specular map? From the image it looks like the oceans are colored in white, while the landmass is black. What would those white spots in the specular map represent? Lakes? Mountaintops? And what about rocky planets without seas? And icy planets? should they reflect more?

Yeah I've seen that there are many archives on the celestia motherlode website. I'll try to contact some of the artists If any of you are reading.. well feel free to join in!

[Don. Edwards]

As a matter of fact NASA's Deep Impact probe just took a series of images of the Earth and Moon and the images show quite a good Sun reflection off the oceans. So yes it is realistic. Unfortunately Celestia can't seem to quite create this effect as well as one would want. But we do with what we can.

What size texture of the Earth are you looking for. If its small enough I can give you the texture from the above image. But be forewarned, the vegetation in this texture is fairly dark and not to everyone's liking. But it is closer to how Earth and any other Earth like planet would probably look like from space. Not like some blue opal gemstone hanging out there.

Don. Edwards

[AvengerDr]

Do you have a link to these NASA images? Since I have to actually develop the shaders used by the game I can try to recreate the effect. I'm currently using 2048x1024 for all my textures.. So if you'd like, let me see this image and I'll see how it looks like!

[Don. Edwards]

The white spots you are seeing inside the continental boundaries are lakes and rivers. In Celestia's engine knows that a black and white textures set as a specmap is for creating the reflective areas on the water, everything black has no reflection. I have played with having a specmap that will reflect light off of snow and ice on the mountain tops and polar caps. but the resulting bright hot-spots just don't look right. So i like everyone else simply use the ocean, lake, and river style specmaps. There are specmaps posted throughout the forum but if you are looking for a prepackaged set of textures including the main texture, normalmap, specmap, cloudmap, and depending on you program of choice a cloudshadowmap. I could quickly put a package together with the above textures and give you a link. They would all be at the 4k level but you can easily scale them down to 2k if need be.

Here is the URL with just of the many articles out there.http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2815&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
There is even a small video made with images but the quality is quite low. Here is the link to the more natural color video. The spec reflection can be seen toward the limb of the Earth.
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/260503main_red_green_blue2.mov

Don. Edwards

[AvengerDr]

Ok then! 4k will be fine thank you