Celestia Forums

Is anyone aware of a method to create realistic high-resolution (2048 to 4086px wide) texture maps of gas giants?

I'm particularly interested in more turbulent styles. Difference clouds and whatnot work "okay" for a planet like Uranus, or even Neptune, but they don't cut the mustard for Jupiter.

Both photoshop and GIMP don't seem to have what I need, when it comes to turbulent clouds. I've used liquify and iWarp (PS/GIMP, respectively), but the sheer amount of work those tools require is too high for too low of quality.

I've also played around with MapZone Editor, and while it does a suitable job for a non-turbulent planet, I cannot find a way to make a usable map to produce realistic swirls/storms.

Finally, Flaming Pear's LunarCell makes a nice cloud map, but it is only suitable for an earth-like planet -- not enough banding. Scaling the layer vertically only ruins the texture, and it's not really set up to be blended with other cloud layers.

I have been up and down the Internet, and this site too, trying to find a tutorial, or even application that might do what I'm looking for, and have come up with squat.

So, if anyone has any ideas, tips, or tricks they're willing to share....please do

Have you tried http://www.solarvoyager.com/ ?
It's dedicated to space art, including planets of all types.

Actually, I have skimmed through their site. They have one decent tutorial that works for simpler planets, but nothing that seems to cover a tumultuous planet like Jupiter.

One thing that "frightened" me is that a search for "realistic" in their forums only turned up four results. I sort of wrote them off, not really being a source for anything believable. (not to belittle the artists -- they've got a lot of good work there!)

I'm beginning to think that this may simply boil down to hours and hours of iWarp or Liquify.

Hmmm... I think your problem is in explicitly searching for "realistic"... far better to search for the kind of tutorial you are looking for and examining the results. Personally if I were writing a tutorial, I probably wouldn't use the word "realistic" in the title, as this is a subjective judgement. Furthermore many tutorials are in the form of image files, which means there isn't much searchable text...

Problem with Jupiter is it is really, really complex... best option is to get familiar with the clone brush

You could use POV-Ray which allows the specification of extremely complex procedural textures (but is a non-GUI application).

An example of a gas giant texture I made in POV-Ray (not in a Celestia context) is here.

ajtribick wrote:Hmmm... I think your problem is in explicitly searching for "realistic"... far better to search for the kind of tutorial you are looking for and examining the results. Personally if I were writing a tutorial, I probably wouldn't use the word "realistic" in the title, as this is a subjective judgement. Furthermore many tutorials are in the form of image files, which means there isn't much searchable text...

I know it. I've searched for a lot of different combinations, with and without "realistic" in it. Unfortunately, most tutorials are simply gradients with a layer of perlin noise added. The one at Solar Voyager was about the only one that even addressed the idea of turbulence.

Problem with Jupiter is it is really, really complex... best option is to get familiar with the clone brush

Yeah, she is at that. Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not quite sure about how the clone brush might help. (unless, I'm just using a high-res image of jupiter as the clone?)

You could use POV-Ray which allows the specification of extremely complex procedural textures (but is a non-GUI application).

Yeah, I'm familiar with it, and have used several different procedural generators. I can't quite seem to get the liquid turbulence, though...

An example of a gas giant texture I made in POV-Ray (not in a Celestia context) is here.

Looks good
Though I'm looking for something far more turbulent.

Here's the catch -- The procedural textures can emulate this at a lower resolution, i.e. when viewed at a distance (such as your image, ajtribick). They look pretty good, then. However, the texture(s) I'm trying to create may ultimately be used in a game where they will be dominating the screen. That's when those textures fall apart.

Coffeebot, I feel i know you from somewhere?

To my knowledge, no one has created a comprehensive procedural planet. The amount of sub procedures are quite extensive. You would need a separate procedure for each major object type such as a tree or a river or a valley, clouds, etc.... If you are from deeplayer, look for my posts I had quite an extensive list of what would be required.

ajtribick wrote:Hmmm... I think your problem is in explicitly searching for "realistic"... far better to search for the kind of tutorial you are looking for and examining the results. Personally if I were writing a tutorial, I probably wouldn't use the word "realistic" in the title, as this is a subjective judgement. Furthermore many tutorials are in the form of image files, which means there isn't much searchable text...

Problem with Jupiter is it is really, really complex... best option is to get familiar with the clone brush

You could use POV-Ray which allows the specification of extremely complex procedural textures (but is a non-GUI application).

An example of a gas giant texture I made in POV-Ray (not in a Celestia context) is here.

OK let's state it: NOONE knows how a REALISTIC gas giant looks like (at high resolution ). Hence that word is of course misleading.

But when searching Google, who says that our friend should search for text?? Here is the way to go:

Switch google to "Images" instead and search for "gas giants" .....WOW, ten pages of amazing images on gas giants for him to choose...

F.

Mayby try working with blender.
It has also procedural tools and it has a very good VISUAL node editor so you can intuitively,easily add nodes to create a new model/particle system/texture? Or am I mistaking?

Coffeebot,
I looked around and found This
(Large image!)
I hope this helps.