Celestia Forums

This is a planet in a large fictional system I'm creating. This isn't my first attempt, but I decided if I start sharing I might be motivated to work on it more. (Guess I should go sign back up at some comic drawing forum too. ) Anyway, my first system is going to be situated around Zeta 2 Reticuli, it has 14 planets and an asteroid belt. And a lot of moons.


Edit: Thumbnail now links to a big version.

This is the first planet. None of them have names - yet.

This is sort of the system's 'Mercury.' Not pleasant, not going to win any beauty pageants, but it's a planet.

Here's an overview of the system:
Zeta 2 Reticuli

Whatcha' think?

DAMN !

I was already working on a large Zeta2 Ret and Zeta1 Ret addon. Many here can testify.

It's my most ambitious project and was working on this since almost a year ! I guess it was inevitable, considering those stars.

**chuckles** They are popular in sci fi circles.... In fact, I'll have an add-on for both of the stars sometime in the future for the ArcBuilder setting.

I hope you aren't going to abandon your work on the system because someone else is using the same stars, though! Half the fun of these things is to see what different people come up with.

...John...

Yeah, don't abandon anything on my account. After all I already had jestr's Alien addon which is the exact same system. This is just the first system in an entire galaxy. Some people are doing Star Wars planets, some are doing Star Trek, Dollan's doing ArcBuilders, There's Orion's Arm and mine is tenatively called 'Verdant Spiral.'

Now the real trick will be to integrate the 'Aliens' Zeta Reticuli into my version. Mmmmmm.. crossover.

Anyway, if my first post ever made you stop creating another cool addon then what would I download?

So does this look sufficiently Hermian? (as Dollan would say )

Hermian, eh? **chuckles** Nice!

It's kind of a small image to tell for sure, so I don't know what kind of crater count there is on the surface. But the gray areas that I see actually remind me of Luunar maria, and so I'm tempted to say the planet looks Selenian in nature (if we're using my PCL terminology).

...John...

Selenian it is then. After all Stargen simply labels it as rock, with a picture of the moon, Astrosynthesis would file it under terrestrial, and I'm not picky.

It has a lot of craters. How big of a pic is too big around here?

You could post a thumbnail with a link to a big picture

The Orion's Arm Zeta I Reticuli add-on can be seen here;
http://www.orionsarm.com/worlds/Zeta_Reticuli.html
based on Anders Sandberg's planets.

it is included in the OA universe package

Okay, since this friendly competition announcement, I decided to share some features of my own Zeta Reticuli addon. I guess there's a good thing to competition

Here's an alien planet located in the Zeta1 Ret system and called "Cylliat":


Here's the same planet at closer range :


Here's a moon ("Nolikat"), close to its parent giant ("Cernunnos"):


And another one (Karistat") :

Those are pretty sweet. Do you mind talking about how you created them? I'm curious. Since mine was just some LunarCell with some layer blending. I see some LunarCell in yours, but they also have a versimilitude that hint to using real world sources to add to them. Care to talk about your process?

I'm using LunarCell only to remove the "pinch" effect at the poles. LunarCell does a very good job there, so I use it as a layer, like you. The rest are real world pictures found on the net, and heavily edited. Here are three very good web sites for free, high resolution textures :

http://www.mayang.com/textures/

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/%7epbourke/texture/

http://www.texturewarehouse.com/gallery/index.php

I start by creating an almost uniform texture at the 4k resolution (4096 X 2048), using stone or metal textures. I offset it by 2048 pixels to remove the side effect, so the texture becomes seamless. I then add the poles using Lunar Cell. After that, I create a grayscale version for the bumpmap, and another one for the specular map. At the end, I reduce everything to 2k for Celestia.

Nice, Cham! I wish I were far enough along to share anything more than a brief description of the primary planets....

...John...

Here's another one, made using the same technique (edited photo of some real material and lunarCell at the poles) :

I hope that disease isn't contagious.

Seriously, the technique of using stone textures for planetary textures is a good one, and I have used it myself once or twice.

Reminds me of an uber-Triton....

...John...

bdm wrote:I hope that disease isn't contagious.

My (pseudo)theory for that one is it was once (a long time ago) entirely covered by a very salty ocean. Because of the very low gravity of this moon, all the water has evaporated to space and left the calcium and salts on the surface. Very rich minerals there.

You know, every time that I try to use LunarCell for an extended period of time, be it a trial version, paid version, or hacked (yes, hacked*), the program seems to reach a point where it will no longer create the final planetary image. I usually end up having to uninstall both the plugin AND the image program and reinstalling them both, all for just a couple of more weeks worth of play before it happens again.

Anyone else have this problem?

...John...



* Before anyone gets all indignant, I found a hacked version BECAUSE of the problem I described, hoping that it would be an effective work around. Unfortunately, no....

No, I didn't experimented any problem with lunarCell yet. However, this plugin isn't that usefull. It's always creating the same kind of patterns and fractal like textures which gets very boring in the long run. Its textures aren't very natural looking (too much fractal like). However, it may be very usefull at the poles, to eliminate the annoying "pinch" effect.

Yeah, I hate a nasty case of pole pinching (you know, I just love saying that!). In fact, I'm ashamed to say, I've started ignoring the problem now, at least until I ready a planetary system for downloading.

Someone had a good mini-tutorial on how to eliminate it using polar coordinates and cloning, but it's such a pain in the arse... **sighs** Ah well, the price one pays to do art...

Unfortunately, I don't think LunarCell would work for me for that, since the primary worlds that I create tend to be very specific. One thing that I DO wish LunarCell could do, would be to create JUST a coud texture, rather than to just meld the clouds onto the planetary image. Wishes, wishes....

...John...

I seem to remember having a similar problem with LunarCell early on, but haven't had that trouble lately. Are you using version 1.5? My problem is if I try to generate a texture larger than about 5000 px it will crash.

Oh, instead of uninstalling and reinstalling the whole filter, find the map it's using to generate the realistic clouds and delete it. I think that worked ... for some reason. Seems like a familiar solution anyway so it must have fixed something at one point.

For clouds try this, which you may already know about:

2922 different cloud maps a year

Might have to remove some coastline, but still handy.

Did the hacked version of LunarCell do anything special?

Speaking of pinching, FlamingPear (the LunarCell folks) distribute a batch of free filters that include filters like Make Cube Tile, Sphere Warp A, and Sphere Warp B which can be used on non-seamless textures to create proper maps for spheres.

Thanks for the insight into your textures, and the links, I'll definately have to incorporate those techniques.