Celestia Forums

I know how to make glowing lights on the dark side of a planet but my question is how do I make them into a realistic pattern?
So far I can only manage to make lighted outlines of the coasts of landmasses. Is there a trick to make the lights look like a believable pattern of cities and lighted roads?

That's an artistic activity

"aszazeroth" has described the method he uses in his "interactive planet tutorial" on the SciFi Meshes forum at
http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/memb ... post148443

Essentially he uses maps of real city streets and roads and blurs them.

selden wrote:That's an artistic activity

"aszazeroth" has described the method he uses in his "interactive planet tutorial" on the SciFi Meshes forum at
http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/memb ... post148443

Essentially he uses maps of real city streets and roads and blurs them.

Too bad I don't have any artistic talent but thank you for the link.

Reiko wrote:Is there a trick to make the lights look like a believable pattern of cities and lighted roads?

Paint an outline of the city/cities on a separate layer to use as a guide. Use a very small brush, and make dots, one by one, vary the density, color and sizes, following this map (on a new layer). Give the area a slight blue tint where you have lots of dots. Then delete the guide and collapse it on a black background.

There??s an example of a result from this in my Ran gallery at the CM.

- rthorvald