Celestia Forums

I'm making a stormy-earth cloud map right now. It looks pretty good & stormy so far, but I want to make it even stormier, with approximately 80% to 90% global cloudcover.

I made it by taking Don Edwards summer earth cloud map and a cloudmap i downloaded from visibleearth.nasa.gov, merging them, and copied/pasted the merged layer into a new layer over the existing layer, inverted it, and offset it by 1024 pixels, and merged it again.

The actual image is 2048x1024.



Any Ideas on what I can do next?

Well, it definitely looks stormy!

One thing you might want to try, though, is to have one or two much larger hurricanes, rather than several small ones. And I did notice some repeating formations in the northern and southern hemispheres.

But these are quibbles from someone who just can't seem to make convincing cloudmaps **chuckles** It looks like you've done a wonderful job!

...John...

PlutonianEmpire wrote:Any Ideas on what I can do next?

Well, how about a range of cloud maps, ranging from almost cloud-free to almost completely overcast, to reflect the range of conditions on a number of different Earth-like (or perhaps not so Earth-like) planets?
That would be very useful when making new worlds with different conditions.
You could merge in a patchy layer of haze to make the cloud cover even thicker.

I took a satellite pic of winter weather over the great lakes region and canada, did some editing, and merged it with an earthmap.

That looks to like a small planet with a lot of cloud; perhaps a small terraformed world.

A larger one would have more visible convection features in the atmosphere.

Once you get that hang of imaginary cloud maps you find that they are more important to the look of a world than the surface map in many cases.

Alrighty. Although my hard drive broke and i had to get a new one, I was able to salvage most of my celestia stuff, mainly cause I had them backed up to cd before we did a reformat. So, for this one, I simply took a cloudmap that i created many months ago which covered an entire planet, added some transparency, and made it my new stormy earth cloud texture, and looks much better than the one above.

Are these going to be available anywhere?

...John...

It was only one single texture the entire time.

And yeah, I'm thinking of putting it up on the motherlode.

Coolness. Can't wait to give it a try, then! My only critique is that the hurricanes don't look that real. But then, it is pretty hard to make a judgment call until I've seen the thing wrapped onto a sphere.

The Motherlode has been suspisciously quiet lately (I've had an add-on waiting to be placed on the site for about four weeks now), so I suspect that the good folks over there are pretty busy with real life matters. So prepare for a wee bit of a wait.

...John...

Pluto - I am working on atlases of worlds of my own design for possible commercial print and as HTML standalone "ebooks / gaming accessories".

Some of my worlds will be calm - some stormy - some in between. I think just with these three cloud textures alone you've run the gambit.
May I have permission to use then to correct my Planet views and give my worlds a little weather?
EMAIL me and we'll discuss it. I'm drooling for those things!!!!!!!!