Celestia Forums

I've been designing my own solar system. So far everything looks good...except for one BIG problem. My habitable planet texture looks FAKE!!! I made it using lunarcell, and the continents just don't cut it. How does everyone else make such real looking planets? Like in Orion's Arm with the Metasofts

Patience and artistry.

One method is to take a photograph of a rock and use portions of that picture with some colorization.

Some people use aerial photographs of unusual locations on the Earth.

You might take a look at the Web site http://www.solarvoyager.com/. They have pointers to some tutorials.

Jamstraz,
There is a really good tutorial on how to make terrestrial planets at
http://s92198053.onlinehome.us/html/pla ... ooine.html

I was going to write one up myself a while back but he beet me to it. This should get you started on your way to creating some very nice textures.

I do plan on writing a tutorial explaining how to create snow on mountains and across open ground. A trick I picked up when making my seasonal textures of Earth.

BTW,
You can actually use LunarCell to make the outlines of your continents and oceans and then use them as a template for the instructions in the tutorial. I did this for one of my moons in an add-on I am the process of finishing up and it worked great.

One other thing, if you use the BlueMarble textures of Earth for you planetary surfaces be sure to desaturate the color at least by 30%, maybe a bit more. When they made those textures they cranked up the saturation level to give a real ooh ahh effect on people when they first see them. But in reality the Earth and it coloring from orbit is much darker and less vibrant. In most cases I would expect most terrestrial planets to be similar. But of course these are your textures and if you want the colors bright and eye catching than it is up to you.

Hope this helps you on your way to being a great texture artist. Celestia needs more of us.

Don. Edwards

Well, I have used Lunarcell to create moon and planet textures...but my big problem is I have a pencil map I made, its very simple and I want to be able to draw that on my own...and wrap it around a planet...not easily done to be sure

Actually I made the Metasoft Reserve planets
http://www.orionsarm.com/topics/Metasof ... erves.html

using Planetgen as a starting point;
but I don't really like the way Planetgen looks, so I modify them quite a lot using Imageforge and Gimp-

the randomised generation of worlds is a good factor in Planetgen, but the fractal appearance is poor, so I eliminate whole continents, clone and paste parts of Earth onto the new planet, and smudge or airbrush over the unrealistic parts.
http://www.download.com/PlanetGen/3640- ... 12611.html
http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.shareup.com/ImageForge-download-1999.html

Alien worlds may have quite different crustal processes to Earth, but if a planet has a naturally occuring Earth-like atmosphere, it is quite likely to have plate tectonics, so try to imagine a history of continental drift for your world- shift a continent or two if necessary.

eburacum45 wrote:Alien worlds may have quite different crustal processes to Earth, but if a planet has a naturally occuring Earth-like atmosphere, it is quite likely to have plate tectonics

Crustal processes should be similar on any kind of rocky planets - at least in a way as fire burns similar anywhere or liquids flow similar. And, as we unterstand currently, really huge amounts of liquid, in special water, is necessary for plate tectonic processes to occure - so there have to be big oceans of any kind.

maxim