My first planet

[Guckytos]

Hi there,

here is the first world map that i created with the GIMP. I am still not very familiar with the prog, but found out how i could clone from other images.
Well it looks a bit akward in my eyes, so any suggestions on how to make it look better are appriciated. But i was not completely free in the decisions on how it sholud look like, since it is from a SciFi series and i had some maps ouf the world. Especially the large mountains are a must.


And i have also two questions:
One: What does a bump map exactly do, if i put one in Celestia, and how do i create it with the GIMP?
Two: I downloaded the 21600x21600 Earth raw data from the NASA site and now i am not able to open it. GIMP says that it doesn't know raw and my trusty Irfanview tells me to get more RAM (i have 386 MB btw.). Can anyone help me out?

[maxim]

Nice.

It looks a little like Gilligans Island than like a whole world. I think things won't be that extinguished from a orbit distance. It may help if you imagine how it would look without water. Where could be the plate boundaries, and the deep sea trenches? If you look at the earth, you might see that mountain areas and high plateaus don't just stand there. There is always a underlying geomorphological structure where all fits into. This make things look natural. Also deserts don't have immediate borders to tropical forests. And it would help if you start your design at a higher scale, let's say 8192x4096 - this forces you to be more carefull with huge scale structures.

A bump map - better a normal map - defines the high and low areas and therefore allows proper shading in celestia. In your example everything is already preshaded - which looks funny if the sun is on the wrong side.

To use normal maps you need a FLAT texture map and a greyscale height map (black=low, white=high). Then you use a tool like nvdxt to transform the height map into a normal map.

maxim

[Harry]

Two: I downloaded the 21600x21600 Earth raw data from the NASA site and now i am not able to open it. GIMP says that it doesn't know raw and my trusty Irfanview tells me to get more RAM (i have 386 MB btw.)

Hm, 21600*21600*3 Bytes = 1.3 GB - you need a littte bit more RAM indeed

You may want to use NetPBM for this. Many linux distros have it preinstalled, it's also available for Windows, though installation may be a bit complicated. These tools need only a few MB of main memory (but lot's of diskspace) - use "rawtoppm" to convert from RAW to netpbm's format, pnmscale to rescale, pamdice to create tiles, etc.

Documentation is here: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/directory.html

Maybe Photoshop is also more capable of handling huge images than gimp is, and a bit more interactive to use (but obviously more expensive).

Harald

[Michael Kilderry]

I like it, I think it looks good for a first try at making a planet, one thing that looked a little bit funny though is it looks a bit like it has been cut and pasted (which it has been) but I think you practice blending the cut and pasted (or cloned) bits.

If you think the planet does look a little awkward, you could try covering up it's imperfections with clouds.

Michael Kilderry