How to create a cloud map/texture?

[Mr Noob]

Hi long time no posting!

Is there any way of creating a cloud map for habitable planets? I have searched google to see if I could find any tutorials or inforomation on clouds. At the moment I am using real time clouds from a sourceforge project called Xplanet. It creates real time global cloud maps of earth every 3 hours. Most of the cloud textures that are on some of the worlds I created are the same or similar, I have even tried to use photoshop to create some clouds from scratch but they are very poor quality. Could anyone help me out here?

Cheers

M.Noob

[selden]

You might try cutting pieces out of other cloudmaps to paste into ones that you've created.

solarvoyager has some tutorials at
http://www.solarvoyager.com/images/tutorials/
e.g.
http://www.solarvoyager.com/images/tuto ... Planet.jpg

[eburacum45]

The cloud maps made from the Xplanet data seem very good to me; are you asking how to vary their appearance?

I use Gimp to make some changes - you can make them hazy, more transparent, copy and move bits of the map around, erase bits; I often make parts of the cloud map completely transparent, or add a thin haze to part of, or the whole map. You can even copy and past the same map repeatedly onto itself to make the clouds more intense, and blur or sharpen the map as desired. Adjust the colour by changing the colour curves to make non-earth-like planets...
lots of fun to be had here... not all of the results will look good, but keep trying.

[zhar2]

Thats fairly easy, just work out wind patters and cells, cut and paste from an earth map and mix/diffuce/tweak/blur and so on to make it seamless.