[watsisname]

Aye, Caerulean (or Cerulean) is a name for the bluish range of colors.

Edit:  As for the banding, I think it was from altering the gradient around the star -- I'll need to be a lot more careful when I do that in the future.
I reworked it from an earlier version, turned out to be easier to fix than I thought it'd be.  There is still a little bit of banding but it is near impossible to remove completely, should be a lot better than it was though.  Thank you for pointing it out.

Fixed version:  

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Now it's perfect

[Snail]

Looks absolutely brilliant.

[jr2]

found this pic on stumbleupon maybe someone can use it as a reference?

[Rodo]

Bump, but for good reasons, so don't kill me 


Sharing this stuff, modeled in blender, origially to be featured in Syrk campaign so I need some feedback on the overall planet.
What do you think? what might need some more work?



I know it's got no starry background, working on that right now... it's just too hard to find good images from the milky way to use.

[Herra Tohtori]

Clouds are very high, terrain very... bland somehow, de-saturated? Hard to tell landmasses from water. The city lights are somehow strange too. Low resolution, too bright?

Also, the Moon is lit incorrectly, giving an appearance of a very small satellite closer to the view point than Earth.

As far as starfield goes, there's a starfield skybox that uses the real stars as seen from Sol system or nearby space (shameless plug) so you might as well use that. It includes automagical milky way effect caused by dim stars.

[Black Wolf]

Might I make a request? I see a lot of excellent planets here which currently aren't getting the exposure and use in mods they should get. Would it be possible for the individuals who've made planets in this thread to maybe upload some proper TGAs or DDS files with the correct Transparencies to somewhere like FSMods? It'd mean a much more diverse planetary pallette for mods, and more people making use of your artwork.

[Rodo]

Clouds are very high

Noticed that too, thanks, I'll modify that right away.

terrain very... bland somehow, de-saturated? Hard to tell landmasses from water.

Mmm.. maybe if I set the texture as normal, I'll check that, the hole hard to tell landmass from water is because of the atmosphere color, maybe If I tone it down a little bit it will work better.

The city lights are somehow strange too. Low resolution, too bright?

The map is definitely too bright, also I think I'm using the wrong method to render it, will try to improve it.

Also, the Moon is lit incorrectly, giving an appearance of a very small satellite closer to the view point than Earth.

I don't understand what you mean, the moon should be bigger or better lit?
I've said nothing.

As far as starfield goes, there's a starfield skybox that uses the real stars as seen from Sol system or nearby space (shameless plug) so you might as well use that. It includes automagical milky way effect caused by dim stars.

Thanks! will check that one right away.

Might I make a request? I see a lot of excellent planets here which currently aren't getting the exposure and use in mods they should get. Would it be possible for the individuals who've made planets in this thread to maybe upload some proper TGAs or DDS files with the correct Transparencies to somewhere like FSMods? It'd mean a much more diverse planetary pallette for mods, and more people making use of your artwork.

Problem is that most of the times, work is done specifically for a particular mod...like special content of some kind.
Could probably make some new stuff and tag it completely mod free, but that's only happening when I'm satisfied with this one.

[Herra Tohtori]

Think of the direction where the light is coming to in case of Earth and in case of the Moon and I think you will notice what I mean.

The Moon is more a crescent form which suggests it is more "between" the view point and the sun, while the Earth is lit more than halfway, which suggests the sun is somewhat "behind" the viewpoint.

This puts the Moon between the Earth and the viewpoint, which makes it appear unrealistically small relative to Earth in this image.

Can't really explain it any better than that.

EDIT: noticed your edit. 

[Topgun]

Bump, but for good reasons, so don't kill me 


Sharing this stuff, modeled in blender, origially to be featured in Syrk campaign so I need some feedback on the overall planet.
What do you think? what might need some more work?



I know it's got no starry background, working on that right now... it's just too hard to find good images from the milky way to use.

nice, how did you make the atmoshpere glow?

[Rodo]

nice, how did you make the atmosphere glow?

I made it this way, you can probably find a better or cheaper way since I'm no expert on this subject, anyways..

First of all make a new sphere a little bigger than the surface and put it on another layer, then:

1- Turn Fresnell to around 3, in the Mirror trans tab.
2- Turn Trashadow on, in the shaders tab, then play around with the colors your material will have, not sure if they are needed or not.
3- Turn on Traceable and Shadbuf if the are not already, in the Links and Pipeline tab.
4- Add a color ramp with the colors you want your atmosphere to have.
5- You'll have to use nodes to make the atmosphere look good, add the filters: Color-> RGB curve, Filter-> Blur and Color-> AlphaOver, connect the RGB curve to the atmosphere image, it will allow you to modify the color of the final render without having to render again, same with the blur, only that it will control the blurriness (?) of the sphere, and the alpha over is to combine the image with the terrain one, it takes the color black as alpha channel color if I'm not mistaken.
Take a look at the values, play around with them and you'll get what you need.

Oh remember to turn on composite on the Render layer, so you can use different render layers at the same time.

Here's an image of most of my settings in blender:





EDIT:

oh and since we are at it.. a little update



It's pretty much as far as I can get with my knowledge :s

Will add the background stars later this week.

[Aardwolf]

Just a thought (and maybe it already is)... shouldn't the cloud layer obscure the city lights somewhat?

[Rodo]

Just a thought (and maybe it already is)... shouldn't the cloud layer obscure the city lights somewhat?

yes, and it does.
check the center of USA, there's a small cloud right there. It doesn't block the light completely, it just lowers the intesity and makes it a little more blurry.

[Aardwolf]

Ah, so it does.

[Rodo]

Ok, I'm kinda bored of tweeking this one right now.. so I'll leave it as it is, I'll convert it to skybox later this week.

[jr2]

Tweaking + Tweeting = Tweeking? 

[starwolf1991]

Woah Rodo 

That is one fine Earth and moon you got there. The way the lighting, atmospheric glow and planatery lights in the shadow come together.......wowies!

Are you planning to turn this into a bitmap by chance?

[Herra Tohtori]

Might as well show off this here. It was one of the iterations for BP:AoA Earth skybox but it ended up somewhat different in the end...



Anyway, this planet was made with the help of this tutorial, I basically re-built the model and adjusted some values to my liking. It's like having a multipurpose planet model now.

Textures were from Blue Marble, and I used 21600x10800 resolution textures for this mainly because the higher ones caused Blender to just die in shock. On Linux, that is. On Windows XP using textures bigger than 8192^2 seems to trigger termination of the program.

[Rodo]

Textures were from Blue Marble, and I used 21600x10800 resolution textures for this mainly because the higher ones caused Blender to just die in shock. On Linux, that is. On Windows XP using textures bigger than 8192^2 seems to trigger termination of the program.

True, on XP you can't use textures that big, I had to stick with 8192x4096 tops, and even with those I still get crashes when rendering, it's a bit frustrating to have a 20 minutes render to only get a crashed blender at the end


BTW your planet looks awesome, better than mine in most areas, I'm particulary interested on the spec options, how you did it? you used a spec map with land-ocean being b&w?

Woah Rodo 

That is one fine Earth and moon you got there. The way the lighting, atmospheric glow and planatery lights in the shadow come together.......wowies!

Are you planning to turn this into a bitmap by chance?

It's on track, I'll be releasing a skybox to the public in a couple of days... I just have to get a clue on how to fix that seam problems on the skybox using blender.

Herra, mind giving me a hint on that? the other post on Modding section was not that clear to me

[Herra Tohtori]

When you have everything in Blender, render the sides of the cubes in 2040x2040 or 4080x4080 resolution, so you don't need to rescale them.*

When you have them rendered, open them up in PS/GIMP, enlarge the canvas to 2048^2 or 4096^2 so that there's a thin border around the actual image. Then, you fill the borders with the edge of the adjacent sides of the cube, so that you basically surround each texture with the four sides next to it.

You need to do it for each texture, so it can be a bit time consuming and tedious, but it works and end results are spectacular.

After you're done, flatten the images and save it, and then you can convert it to DDS for final game usage.


And yeah, I used a specular map of Earth, which was also from NASA/Blue Marble. Look into that tutorial, it is a gold mine. As soon as the hardware and software can handle it, I'll be using the full resolution Blue Marble data set, though. That's four times higher resolution than what that planet uses... giving you surface resolution of 500 metres per pixel.


Regarding skybox resolution: 2048^2 (0r 2040^2 with the seamless method) is sufficient for most cases, but you will likely want to save them in uncompressed format (u555 for starfield only, u888 for content that has more colour depth) which means they still use a lot of memory. It will also suffer from upscale-blurring when you want to reduce the field of view.

4096^2 (or 4080^2) on the other hand is huge and that means you can use smaller field of view (-fov setting in command line) and still retain crisp, detailed look of the background, and as an additional advantage you can get away with using dxt1 compression, which has a compression ratio of 1/6.

That means that if you just used single layer, non-mipmapped backgrounds, then 4096^2 dxt compressed file is actually more memory efficient than a non-compressed, 2048^2 u888 file. However, you'll likely want to include two levels of detail mipmapping in larger resolution skybox, because otherwise the shimmering at higher field of view gets just a tad bit excessive...

Command line for this is as follows (assuming use of nvdxt):
nvdxt -file <4096^2-textures> -dxt1a -quality_highest -nmips 2 -sinc