[PSYCHO]

do This its awesome.
         Please tell use Thunder  

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Got to be Psychopathic to use TS
United Space

[DragonClaw]

 

After a conversation I had about planets, and how tricky it was to get them to look right, I decided to try and prove myself wrong. Personally I think I did rather well, and discovered that Lunarcell ability to import real time cloud images makes a dramatic improvement on how a planet looks. Here's the first of four image I turned out in the space of a couple of days using this method.

DUHHHH... its called LunarCell

sorry for my ignorance but it was necessary

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    -Director of the staff of Hidden Terror.
   -Fleet Admiral of The Ancients Armada

         

The fear always controls our attitude, let us fear no more!

[PSYCHO]

    Well I thought that lunarcell was a person...........Excuse Me allmighty Render expert.....

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Got to be Psychopathic to use TS
United Space

[Fineus]

Me = Honored, thanks for the praise dude  

I used 3 things (all programs  ): Photoshop, Lunarcell and Glitterato (both Photoshop plug-ins).

Glitterato created the background, note the fairly low contrast on the nebulas, so your attention isn't really drawn from the planet.

Text was added using Photoshop, and the grey "3D" look it's got is due to my using "render lighting" on the text layer, with a white omni light a little way from the text resulting in slight greying around certain parts of the text (thus not as bold or "in your face" as solid white would be).

Finally the planet, after playing with the "random" tool for a while to get a nice looking planet, I changed the various colors to something that suited what I wanted. I then downloaded real time cloud images from GeoSat (click on the cloud button in the plu-in). Then fiddled a little more to get it looking how I wanted.

Put it all together and Bam, there it is  

[PSYCHO]

    Very Nice thanks dude  

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Got to be Psychopathic to use TS
United Space

[Sandwich]

LOL - you got the same storm swirl in the upper-left quadrant as I did.  

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"He who laughs last thinks slowest."
"Just becase you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
"To err is human; to really screw up you need a computer."
Creator of the Sandvich Bar, the CapShip Turret Upgrade, the Complete FS2 Ship List and the System Backgrounds List (all available from the site)

[Fineus]

Hehe, I guess we used the same satellite  

That is a problem of course... you can't "generate" real clouds... therefore you can only make so many different clouds every day and it's pure luck as to what they look like.