Building gas giants from scratch

B_McKinley · Post #1by **B_McKinley** » 13.10.2005, 02:11

Having searched the web and found only a couple of tutorials on creating a gas giant from scratch I decided to mess around in photoshop and see what I could come up with through experimentation.

Also I wanted to see if it was possible to get a good result with a minimum of artistic effort. The more automatic I can make it the better it will be to record as an action and distribute.

Here's the first test, click through for a bigger sample:

The first thing I learned was that photoshop has a noise gradient that can create a gradient of randomly sized bands of color. The bands can be color adjusted and randomized.

Next I used combinations of ripple, ocean ripple, wind, and motion blur. Most importantly I used liquify to give it bands of 'turbulence' going in alternate directions.

Of course spent some time tweaking the colors and constrast.

I added a layer of clouds pasted in and screened using a real cloud map. But this is way overdone in this first try. I should scale it back and down.

After looking at it in Celestia I decided it probably didn't even need as much blur as I added and I only added maybe 10 px worth or less. The detail is still there but it is very subdued.

bdm · Post #2by **bdm** » 13.10.2005, 02:48

Not bad at all, I'm looking forward to the tutorial when it's posted.

The clouds don't look right. On gas giants, clouds occur in bands. Confining the clouds in bands within a narrow latitude range will create good clouds.

Beowulf01 · Post #3by **Beowulf01** » 13.10.2005, 03:23

Hello everyone long time no post from me...

I do like this texture, from looking at it i was assuming bdm that this is a sub-Jovian in the same size and chemical make up as Neptune and uranus...

I was gonna post a link of my Jovians, but i realized i haven't put them into Celestia yet...

Dollan · Post #4by **Dollan** » 13.10.2005, 14:08

One thing to keep in mind is that Jovian cloud bands are largely created by the rapid rotation of the planet. Epistellar Jovians, then, could well have alargely uniform appearance, while slower-rotating Jovians may have larger, less turbulent bands.

...John...

Don. Edwards · Post #5by **Don. Edwards** » 13.10.2005, 21:49

I like the direction you have taken with this. It has a very realistic look to it and with the exception of the white clouds you are moving in the right direction. I find myself getting tired of using hacked and tweaked Jupiter to creat these great beasts. So anything that can come close is a big plus.

Don. Edwards

B_McKinley · Post #6by **B_McKinley** » 13.10.2005, 22:51

I gave it a second pass. Trying to see if I can generate replicatible, but diverse results.

Click thumbnail

The liquify filter definately is a big help in this, without it I'd probably be pushing pixels around for hours. And stil the results wouldn't be as uniform. This sample took less than half an hour I think.

Thoughts?

Dollan · Post #7by **Dollan** » 13.10.2005, 23:09

Oh, I do like this one. You definitely are getting the hang of something here. Have you tried to generate any ovoid storm systems? Not neccessarily major Red Spot style storms, but just the smaller versions?

...John...

danielj · Post #8by **danielj** » 13.10.2005, 23:09

I really like this texture.It is very nice.

B_McKinley wrote:I gave it a second pass. Trying to see if I can generate replicatible, but diverse results.

Click thumbnail

The liquify filter definately is a big help in this, without it I'd probably be pushing pixels around for hours. And stil the results wouldn't be as uniform. This sample took less than half an hour I think.

Thoughts?

B_McKinley · Post #9by **B_McKinley** » 13.10.2005, 23:29

Creating storm systems seems possible, but I think that's going to take a little practice to make it look right. So far I can create a roundish area that all the clouds displaces around. The toruble so far is that the storm itself has little or no detail left.

The interesting development is that it occured to me that Liquify lets you save and load meshes. Which means that sort of eliminate 1 more bit of artistic judgment/skill. Is not that I'm against artistic stuff, I'm just lazy

. I'm definately starting to believe I might be able to make a LunarCell style filter out of this. Which would be cool. If I knew how to make a filter.

time to google.

Don. Edwards · Post #10by **Don. Edwards** » 14.10.2005, 01:18

There are few things you can try. Since you are using Photoshop you can use the smudge tool at the band bounderies to make the colors and band flow even more fluidly. Have done this with very good results. About storms. One posible way to do them is to trim them from a Jupiter texture, recolor to match your texture, and then blend them in and at the edges use the above mantioned tool to smooth them in. Trust me it works very well. You can also make the storms by hand. I was going to show you an example of what I did 2 years ago but I can't find the images and nothing on the shatters.net server seems to go far enough back to show these old pics. If I come across one of the images I will post it here so you can get and idea of what i did.

Don.

UPDATED!
I found one image that shows the hand made storm I did back when I was in my infancy at texture making. It looked ok and would look allot better if I would recreate it know. So here is the image, blown up a bit so you can see some detail. I hope it gives and idea of this can be done.

Don.