[Nyctaeus]

It's amazing as a first planet . I'd like to see only sharper clouds.

[rscaper1070]

I like you red giant. Blue nice to, but is cutted from one side and badly centered .

Thank you. Whoops, that was the one I hadn't tested in Fred yet. Fixed, go ahead and download.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/kxn2i6awx24582q/Gas%20Giants.rar

[Rodo]

good, nice planet for the first one indeed.

[watsisname]

Outstanding!  Usually people keep it simple for a first planet, but here you've got seas, clouds, atmospheric haze and halo, and even the smaller details like color differences along the coastlines, specular reflection on the water, and a smooth transition to a darker/fainter atmo-glow on the nightside, so I am extremely impressed.

[Shivan Hunter]

[EDIT]: derp, my 1 bit per second connection ate most of my original post trying to refresh the page, or something. So I'll just post my new planet.

[Nyctaeus]

Another good one, and another ugly clouds. Try to do something like cloud-maps as you can find on google, or use and alter one of the cloudmaps.

[TopAce]

Those clouds look familiar. Are you by any chance using a plugin? I did some similar planets with an easy-to-use plugin for Photoshop, and they looked similar to the one you posted there - with an arguable worse atmosphere, however.

[Shivan Hunter]

Clouds are done by using a Solid Noise render in Gimp, then IWarping it (distorting by moving around/rotating areas of the image), then darkening some parts and IWarping again. I then use bumpmap filters to get some more detail, but that may not work as well as I'd hoped.

Here are the same clouds without any shadowing (I used two layers, each bumpmapped from opposite angles, one addition/one subtraction, and then moved the subtraction (shadow) layer over 3 pixels):

[T-LoW]

Search for Earth cloudmap - make it a spherical texture - rotate it so you can see enough details beneath its surface.

And maybe bumpmap those islands for more realism

Still a very good attempt, Sir

[watsisname]

I think the addition blending is making the image too bright overall.  Instead of using addition and subtraction, try making one cloud layer white and the other black (just inverse the color values), put them both as "normal" layers with the black layer below the white one, and then offset the black layer slightly to simulate the shadowing.

[Shivan Hunter]

I'll see what a cloudmap can do sometime. Sounds good- better than making everything based on solid noise lol

The previous planet was too bright on purpose. I was experimenting with different kinds of atmospheres- it looks better farther off than it does closer up.

Anyway, was bored this morning so I made another- very large terraformed moon, or planet that's been bombarded all over by asteroid impacts. You astronomer types can figure out exactly what it would be, I guess. No clouds this time.

[Rodo]

It's good, it's really good

[Nyctaeus]

Pretty , reminds me terraformed Mars from DoS .

[Snail]

This **** looks awesome bro, you're winner!

[watsisname]

Very nice.   Might I inquire on your cratering technique?

[Shivan Hunter]

Simple enough. Started with light gray, and used a circular brush of uniform color to darken circular areas. I do this with several different sizes of brush, then use "make seamless" which is crude but effective. Then I copy the image, tile it 2x or 3x on the same image (small tiles), and make it an "overlay". Once I've done this several times to have some truly small craters, I merge all the layers, copy the image, do an edge-detection on the copy so it's lit at only the edges of the more prominent craters, and make that an "addition" filter. THIS IS A HEIGHTMAP- I used it alongside the Solid Noise layer for the terrain, and bumpmapped it for detail once I had merged the layers and fiddled with the colors.

[Shivan Hunter]

Was bored again. Simple one this time- a shiny (metallic?) moon.



(Except for the very first one, these all have 4096^2 versions. Imageshack won't take pngs that huge. For bandwidth reasons I'll be posting 1024^2 ones from now on, since even 2048^2 is pretty big.)

[Snail]

That is amazing.

[Rodo]

good looking, looks very "realistic" if I may say so 

[Nyctaeus]

Looks like a something like Europa - cyan areas are crystal clear water under thin layer of ice. I'll use it in this role in my projects. Good work .