New Solar System, old Textures, what to do?

[Apollo7]

Making new solar systems is pretty fun for me, but I often have to recycle old textures as I can not make my own and I do not really know where I can get new ones that are not Terran System related. I'm wondering what I might do to remedy this situation? I just need something, anything to fill the void so my semi-earth-like worlds don't just always look like Mars.

Cheers.

[selden]

It depends on what kind of terrain you want.

Any paint program can be used to draw a picture you can use as a surface texture image. It just has to be a jpg or png that's a power of 2 on a side.

Another method is to digitally cut rectangular pieces out of landsat or other high-altitude pictures of the Earth. Some terrain is very strange looking.

Without some touchup, both of these metods will produce a "squished" appearance around the poles.

And there are quite a few freeware fractal terrain generators.

[Guest]

I've been using Rassilons texture packs to texture my extrasolar systems...They're not mine I know, but they really do the trick...You can experiment with photoshop or whatever to change these to your own taste...(sorry Rass). You can also play with the atmosphere colours...add moons...rings...the limit is the imagination!

I've done a bump mapped version of Jupiter...2k using Rass' technique. A bit over the top, but it does look good. I will post a pic when the ESB's done it's trick...(Hic!).

Best regards...bh.

[Apollo7]

Well my system requires the whole range of terrain, from terrestrial to ice-planet and jovian worlds. Quality is not as much of an issue as variety. I'd do it myself but I haven't got photoshop on the PC (just a Mac version), and I'm not that good at making things with any realism. Anyway I'll check out the Ras textures, should be of help, thanks.

Cheers.

[Guest]

A great help here is Rassilon's 'Cluster generator'...It makes random systems!...Just edit out the star data and put in or edit the planetary data to match your system.

[Cormoran]

For the 40 Eri system I'm developing, I've used a variety of methods to get either original-looking or completely original textures.

Take a look at the thread related to this project under Add-ons. It'll be posted for download as soon as I have finished a sub-project (that being a random asteroid belt generator).

For texture and bump/normal maps, I use Fractal Terrains (FT) by ProFantasy (Not free, but not too expensive). With tweaking it will also generate cloud textures.

For moons I've found it useful to combine textures generated as above with bumpmaps that are combinations of the texture and various moons of the solar system. I use the FT-generated texture map as a basis and add the moon bumpmaps as a translucent layer above it. If the transparency isn't too opaque, it looks different enough for the eye not to notice too much. With using bumps of the actual moon (luna, selene, call it what you will), you have to be careful because the surface features are so familiar (the Mare Orientale especially). I masked it off with cloned craters from elsewhere.

I've only been using this method for a week and, while not as artistic as the efforts of the more talented folks in here, its a useful way of doing things.

Cheers,

Cormie

[Cormoran]

As per my last post, I've had some interesting results combining texture maps. The latest experiment involves taking Bump maps of various worlds and combining them, then importing them as heightfields into a program called Wilbur :
http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~jslayton/software.html

Wilbur has several advantages over Fractal Terrains (which was also written by the same guy), though the interface can be daunting. Still, lovely results

This is what happens when you combine Earth and Callisto, then key the colours to height. If the clouds and atmosphere were removed, its how I imagine Earth might look after the sun goes Red Giant:



If anyone wants the texture set, let me know and I'll post it. Its kinda weird watching the Earth rotate with the above texture enabled. Different, yet hauntingly familiar.

Cheers,

Cormoran

[Darkmiss]

Thats quite nice...

[Cormoran]

Glad you liked it, Paul...

I think its the Celestia texture equivalent of that old hollywood standby for building spacecraft, called the kit-bash