Celestia Forums

Hi, I'm making a texture for my Solarius system (maybe it'll be an add-on one day), but now I'm making a texture for an alternative Earth, called Gaia. Gaia has a radius of 8750 km, but is a bit less dense than Earth, having gravity about 10.63 m/s?. It has average temperature of 7?C, but due to the thick atmosphere of 5x air pressure, the poles are hot enough to allow some vegetation, but still cold enough to have thin layer of ice on land.

Gaia have, I think, about 50% land and 50% water. But I think due to the thick air and more humidity, there will have some deserts, but with some vegetation, not Saara-like deserts. The true deserts would be small spots, for example, in Africa, Australia, Tibet, California, Caribe, southwest Brasil, center of Nazca continent and Arabia. In Gaia, some deserts are seas instead.

But I'll continue to change the map.

What I want to know is if my texture is good. For example, I want to know if my deserts are in the right place, based on Earth latitude deserts position. If the forests should be darker or clearer, if deserts should have more or less vegetation, and other things.

Here's the texture:

I did a new texture, this time, at least to me, more realistic. Is it better?

This time I put a link due to the larger size of the image. This time I also did a better position of deserts, based on latitude. But next time I'll try to make this image even more realistic.

http://i25.tinypic.com/hu11tl.jpg

That is a very nice texture. You can see that this texture is derived from the continents and oceans of Earth; a very interesting concept.
One change that would make this map slightly better would be if the shallow waters had a slightly lighter blue colour. Looking at the map of Earth, quite large regions of shallow water can be seen in various locations, outlined in lighter blue colours- particularly noticable around the mouth of the Amazon and around Indonesia and the Phillipines. And a bit of shallow water colouration would make this texture look even better.

Which program or package are you using to make this map?

IMO your texture looks too much like Earth with less water, you should at least mirror it or something, or ooh, I got a cool idea, mirror it then switch the ocean/land (ocean where your land is and vice versa).

Really good job though, it looks very realistic.

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