Celestia Forums

This is the first time I've been able to make my own planet textures and cloud map. As you can see I still have a long way to go and could use some advice for improvement.


800x459 68kb


800x459 45kb

I made the texture using Fractal World Explorer but I tend to get a geometric look when I use water erosion.
The cloud map was made from a photo acquired at Real Time Cloudmap

Thank you to Apollonius for answering some question about FWE

Sorry, I can't offer advice as I don't do planets, however these look very nice (especially for a first effort).
To my untrained eye they look finished. Does fractal explorer create cylindrical maps, or do you have to convert it's output to C-maps after generating your terrain?

Reiko,

In a word, none of these tools makes a convincing planet. The only way to make a planet like that is Earthlike is too the specmap generated by these programs and then cut, paste, and mrege various iages chunks from Earth textures, or from pieces of other planet and moons. This give the most realistic look, but is more work.

Diabloblanco had a real good tutorial of making an terran type planet, but his website has since gone down. But I did manage to get a copy of the whole tutorail and if you interested I can post it. There are a few other tutorails out there if you look for them,

Don. Edwards

Don. Edwards wrote:...Diabloblanco had a real good tutorial of making an terran type planet, but his website has since gone down. But I did manage to get a copy of the whole tutorail and if you interested I can post it. There are a few other tutorails out there if you look for them,

Don, some Tutorials are always welcome; remember we can extend the list in this thread (was to give newbies some good links):

http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7183

The contenents look vaguely familliar...



Anyway, good work. I like it.

Don. Edwards wrote:Reiko,

In a word, none of these tools makes a convincing planet. The only way to make a planet like that is Earthlike is too the specmap generated by these programs and then cut, paste, and mrege various iages chunks from Earth textures, or from pieces of other planet and moons. This give the most realistic look, but is more work.

Diabloblanco had a real good tutorial of making an terran type planet, but his website has since gone down. But I did manage to get a copy of the whole tutorail and if you interested I can post it. There are a few other tutorails out there if you look for them,

Don. Edwards

Oh yes please post the tutorial, I could really use it. And if somebody can help me get the tools installed to make VT's I would appreciate that too.

Chuft-Captain wrote:Sorry, I can't offer advice as I don't do planets, however these look very nice (especially for a first effort).
To my untrained eye they look finished. Does fractal explorer create cylindrical maps, or do you have to convert it's output to C-maps after generating your terrain?

I'm not sure what you mean by cylindrical, there doesn't appear to be any "pole pinch" if that is what you are referring to.

Tuefish wrote:The contenents look vaguely familliar...



Anyway, good work. I like it.

I'm sorry they look a little similar. FWE is random as far as I can tell when it generates a map.
Here is what the full map looks like..

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b322/ ... xture1.png 374kb

Very nice Reiko, far better than I could do!

Those look great, Reiko! FWE has its limitations, but you actually CAN use it to produce some great-looking, realistic textures if you're patient enough with the software to learn a few tricks. The limitations...or many of them...can be overcome with paintshop or photoshop. One of those limitations is the fact that water erosion (and rivers) have a very isometric look to them at times. You can get around that by raising the shading definition to like 200 or so, calculate your rivers or erode with water, then lowering the shading definition. This makes rivers with so many angles that they appear more naturally curved.

If nothing else, FWE is a great point of departure.

Oh, and THANKS for the 'Real Time Cloudmap' link!!! Too cool...

If I'm not out of topic, I should have found this:

http://sourceforge.net/project/screensh ... p_id=70351

Good work, Reiko.

Don. Edwards wrote:Diabloblanco had a real good tutorial of making an terran type planet, but his website has since gone down. But I did manage to get a copy of the whole tutorail and if you interested I can post it. There are a few other tutorails out there if you look for them,

Are you referring to This tutorial? If so, I'd recommend anyone interested grab it; that link goes to the web archive, and it can sometimes be hard to track down a working version. (Page 2 of the tutorial is also available, but it's an older version in text. If you can't see the text, select all to highlight it. The page is kind of flaky.)

Diabloblanco's site appears to be at this address now (I found it by searching for his 3d-duckboy name after finding it in another post here), but not all of the sections work and I haven't seen the tutorial on there yet.