Celestia Forums

I am developing a planet map for a system that I am building and I am looking for help in make the map. I have an outline of what I would like the continents to look like but would like help in making it more earth-like. The current resolution is 4096 x 2048

Info on the planet
The planet is 1.15 earth G’s
Spins on a 37hr retrograde axis
60% of planet surface is water; the other 40% is land/ice caps

Geological features.
The planet is geologically stable, however there is obvious evidence that the planet was struck by a massive barrage of asteroids and/or comments in the very recent past, some creating creators thousands of kilometers wide and more that were tens of kilometers wide. This caused massive waves that wiped away most of the distinguishable features, so not the planet has a few mountain ranges, but no more great ranges with high peaks, the planet is now essentially flat. The plant life is mainly green to gold prairie lands.
The draing of the great flood caused many, slow moving rivers (Mississippi/Yellow/Nile/Congo like) to form as water receded off the land.

If anyone would be willing to help me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Link to downloadable Image
http://www.linkline.com/personal/mkruer/Praelos%20Edge%20Landmap.tif

A better spproach to what your doing would be using flaming pear's luna cell as a template...Make a spectural map or ocean map of the land masses first...Remember that the specturals are inverted so run it through inverse first...then do a select by color or color range and select the black which should be your land masses...Then create a duplicate layer for the land masses and leave the spectural map untouched...When that is selected use the clone brush to surface your land using a landsat or other similar image with plenty of resolution and plenty of land variation...etc...

When thats completed remember to deselect and offset both layers by half the width of the texture....do a reselect of the spectural map's black regions and clone brush on the 2nd layer to get rid of that nasty seam...Now deselect and offset both layers again...now reselect the black as before and do an inverse select...Remember to keep the fuzzyness or amount of color selected always the same...I would use 200 the maximum...

Now fill the oceans on the 2nd layer with the color of choice....Now do a select > modify > contract of say 100 pixels and copy and paste that selected layer into another layer...darken it a bit and then filter > blur > guass blur say 10-25...This will give the oceans a bit of depth...You can then flatten the image and viola your new planet...

You can play with the features a bit to get different effects...Also if your not using photoshop I believe the gimp contains most of these steps one im not sure of is the offset feature...