[aldo_14]

Surely it depends where, the texture meets though, Ditortion only really applies to the poles, Which are often in the case of M-class (i hate trek) are snowy, gas goants are normally uniform swirl, and rocky ones are just rocky.......


This is one to add to the K-Faq once we master it..........

Well, try it.  It usually looks **** to have a uniform colouration in anything except snowy poles, and even in that case you have to face the issues of things like realistic atmospheric cloud, and that poles are not uniformly white in reality anyways (even if close to it).  With, say, Mars it's actually a struggle to keep the icecaps a reasonable and real size whilst cutting out the distortion..... hence why I (and probably others) would like to see a tutorial on such a thing.

[Herra Tohtori]

To create better poles, make the poles in texture one trasnparent. Then make another texture which has the pole textures on opposite sids of the equator and map that texture to sphere also; then turn that sphere 90 degrees so that the pole parts are visible through the transparent poles of the first sphere texture.

Blur the edges slightly or perform other necessary operations to blend the two parts together. Voilá.

...I know this is kinda duct tape solution, but it would work. It just takes some more work to do. And it is true that uniform colour poles suck, big time.

[Colonol Dekker]

Gordon bennet, This could take a while. I'll look for some bits tomorrow and post results in the afternoon.


Good luck people. 

I'm off down the pub, The other halfs out on girls night out, so i'm gonna leave kiddies round nans and go meet the lads.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/11885274/?qo=40&q=by%3Aalyn+sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps

Good tutorial for both people making planets in both 2d and 3d.

[watsisname]

@ Herra, referring back to starfields and nebulae:

Ah, I didn't realize you were manually putting the big stars in.  I'd been too focused on using finding settings/tools to do it to think of that. 
I used noise/hurl because it was the first decent-looking tool that I came across.  Works pretty much the same as default noise. 
Another cool thing to try with bright stars it to use the sparkle effect (under filters > light effects).  It can add some pretty nice eye candy to a starfield or small cluster of bright stars.

I've checked the guide Lt.Canonfodder posted, and (at least at a quick scim-through), looks very useful.  Some of the planets the author created are very impressive, too.  Definitely worth checking out.

[Herra Tohtori]

Ah, I didn't realize you were manually putting the big stars in.  I'd been to focused on using finding settings/tools to do it to think of that. 

Sometimes it's fastest and easiest to do things manually. For example, in GIMP I'm sometimes missing some standard MS Paint features, namely drawing lines.

I used noise/hurl because it was the first decent-looking tool that I came across.  Works pretty much the same as default noise. 
Another cool thing to try with bright stars it to use the sparkle effect (under filters > light effects).  It can add some pretty nice eye candy to a starfield or small cluster of bright stars.

ARgggh no, not them...

 

I don't like them very much, they look cheesy to me. They might be useful if you want to simulate the light effects inside a camera or a telescope (ie. diffraction causing the familiar  four "spikes" of stars and so on, but I prefer to have the images as plain eye would see them. But whatever floats your boat. And I agree that in some situations, controlled use of any feature may get good results.

I've checked the guide Lt.Canonfodder posted, and (at least at a quick scim-through), looks very useful.  Some of the planets the author created are very impressive, too.  Definitely worth checking out.

Yes... unfortunately that, too, requires some basic skills in editing existing textures. It doesn't tell you how to make a planet texture from scratch.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Yes... unfortunately that, too, requires some basic skills in editing existing textures. It doesn't tell you how to make a planet texture from scratch.

Mind you, pretty much no one makes planet textures from scratch. Real-world images and/or planet maps are always used as source material, and that's the key to making the planets look really good.

For free textures...
http://www.mayang.com/textures/
http://www.imageafter.com/
http://www.texturewarehouse.com/
http://www.cgtextures.com/

[Flipside]

Theres a technique in Lightwave, which I'm assuming has a counterpart in Max, where you can apply a procedural texture to an onject and then bake that texture to a UV Map. If you create a map where most of the circle is Spherical Map, but the poles are planar mapped and then bake that texture you can get the map into a useable UV. The downside with this method is you need to be very good at procedural textures, and I'm not.

I also find a program like Deep Paint 3D is a big help for planets.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Problem with procedural textures is just that, they rarely look better than textures made by hand. They work fine in a few cases, but with planets... just no.

[Flipside]

Very true, however, they are useful for providing a template to work from, and for putting basic land-masses/shadowing onto your map. You can then, with work in Photoshop, work on the finished map using multiply layers etc and enhance the detail. At least that way you know you will get a smooth transition no matter where you look at the model from.

[Herra Tohtori]

 


Some new stuff... Not as high resolution as the previous ones, but still looks nice in my opinion. Made from the scratch... mainly because I find it easier to make the texture myself from the beginning than to edit an existing texture. : I guess that's related to my way of climbing to a tree backwards. Meh. Again, the program used was GIMP, purely.




Here's the same planet with settlement lights visible on the dark side. That was just an experiment, though.


As I said, it's not as high-res as the previous monstrosities (such as the 4096x4096 pixel Mars). Main reason is that I made the original texture in 2048x2048 to save time. One GB of memory is on the verge of being inadequate for this kind of things, I've noticed. But I guess it could make a decent desktop in proper context.

[Aardwolf]

I think the settlements need less blurring. The distribution is fine, but they are too blurred.

Edit: idunno, maybe not.

[Herra Tohtori]

Another one, made with similar technique as the previous one but in 4096x4096 resolution. The difference is rather clear. Although I'm not completely happy with how the atmospheric blur came out on this one, this is perhaps the best of my planets thus far.




Click the picture for 2048x2048 resolution version.

[watsisname]

Very nice work there.  I especially like the "Amazon Rainforest" look you get from those clouds on the left continent.

[Herra Tohtori]

It's time to bump this thread again, as people seem to be interested in planets again and threads about planets are popping up here and there. And of course, I've got some new planets I've made...

...Like this for example. Gas giant, and a habitable planet/moon orbiting it.



Both are using entirely procedural textures.

Incidentally, I've been experimenting with ways to reduce the polar distortion on square textures. One important tool is the polar coordinates filter, which cannot be used outright but it does offer a way to make distortion-free polar areas out of a square texture. Sadly, it cannot really be applied to middle parts of the texture successfully, so it's a matter of making two polar areas and cutting the rest of the layer off, and then successfully merging unmodified part of the original texture in the middle with the polar regions up and below. Results can eventually be made into, for example, this (a low resolution version of the gas giant's texture - the original is 4096x4096):



Or if you're making a habitable planet with continents and oceans, you can do the trick to a layer containging uniform noise clouds, then apply brightness/contrast to your liking, which gives you a nice outline texture for the continents.



This map can be mapped onto sphere without any distortion whatsoever. What you stuff into the continents is a different matter, obviously. And you can decide freely which is land, black or white...

[m2258734a]

Your gas giant system looks great. How did you come about making the texture? What I do (which usually doesn't come out looking how I want it to) is that I apply the colors that I want for a gas giant using an airspray or any other similar pattern. Then, I motion blur the image until I get the desired bands. From there I add swirls and waves and so on and so forth. I then spherize the image and that's it. A very simplified description, but that's pretty much the gist of my "technique".

[Herra Tohtori]

By using a complex combination of *several* layers.

The psd file where I've got the texture layers saved is round'bout 160 MB and has five layers at 4096*4096 res. That's medum-sized compared to some of the habitable planets, though... :

The polar coordinates distortion filter is extremely useful, and it was used to practically every layer. It's a tricky beast though... you have to make upper part, lower part and middle part of a layer and then blend them together as smoothly as you can, in order to make a texture that can be wrapped to a ball seamlessly. Now keep in mind that this must be done to every layer before blending them together to form the end result with different layer modes.

The base colour layer is basically an uniform noise cloud layer which has been polar distorted and coloured to my liking.

The belts and zones are made by making a 16*4096 layer, filling it with uniform noise, then maximizing contrast and applying motion blur horizontally to make the dark and light areas horizontal; then I copied the layer, turned it 180 degrees and superimposed it on top of the original to make the northern and southern hemispheres more similar... Then I simply scaled that layer to 4096*4096 and there I had the basic colour variations for belts and zones.

The turbulence was the trickiest part to get right by far.

First, there's two levels of turbulence. There's lower level turbulence that doesn't care about the belts and zones and runs beneath them as strong base currents. Then there's the finer detail closer to the surface, which is mostly visible at the edges of belts and zones as mixing colours, light and dark...

So, I first had to create lower level and higher level turbulence maps and polar distort them both.

Then I took the fine detail layer, put the belt/zone stripe layer on top of it and figured out how on earth I could make it most visible only at the edges of belts and zones... Then I remembered the way to find the edges on images. So I did some edge stuff to the stripe layer and in the end I had a new layer, which had black on the edge areas and white on the belts/zones themselves. Then I simply turned black to transparent and lo behold, the fine detail layer formed, which had most detail visible at the edge areas and less in the middle of the belts/zones.


Then it took some creative mixing of layer modes to make the end result you see... Feel free to experiment, it's not easy and takes a whole lot of time especially on the first time when you have to figure everything out, but it's definitely rewarding.


After the texture is ready, I just mapped it to sphere and checked that it was distortion-free. It was.


Also, some gas giants have very little detail visible to bare eye. Saturn for example only has mild belts and zones, but it has the rings... and a load of moons. Also Uranus and Neptune have remarkably little detail compared to for example Jupiter. The amount of detail is almost directly proportionate to the temperatures on the planet. High temperatures usually mean big energy differences wich cause violent turbulence. If the planet is more uniform temperature, much less detail forms. Different strengths of detail layers can be used to produce different kind of detail, obviously.


Also, a lot of system RAM is recommended for operating with big files. I got fed up with my HD cache scrunching like no tomorrow when the page file got filled (! and I had like several GB's paging file on settings!) and slowing everything down, so I walked to a store and bought two 1024 MB DDR memory modules to add to the two 512MB modules I had previously... so now my system has 3 GB of DDR memory. Unsurprizingly the HD pagefile crunching ended immediately, and now I can swap between layers and big files much faster and without fearing that the GIMP might crash because of some error in the paging process.

It took a cut on my wallet, but sometimes you just have to bear the hunger for art... I no longer wonder why graphics designers use such beastly computers as work stations.

[Aardwolf]

Seems this would be the place to post this:

A planet. The texture is mine, and the method used to create it (and the atmosphere glow, etc.) is mine. MINE! You may use it for FS2, or whatever. If somebody uses it... some credit somewhere would be appreciated, especially if someone asks.

I'll upload a rar containing the actual planet if anybody wants it and I ever come back to this thread. The gif format sorta lost some stuff.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[m2258734a]

Nice planet Aardwolf.

I think you should go ahead and provide the original file. You don't have to save your image with the pure green background. You could just save your image as a 32-bit .tga by going through the process of setting your background to 0% opacity, depending on the program you used.

Herra, thanks for the tips on making gas giants. Seeing all of the fantastic pieces of work you all have made is making me realize something. There is so much talent on this thread, yet the planets of FS are in dire need of variety, higher resolution, and imagination. The planets used in the main FS2 campaign look great, don't get me wrong. They are marvelous improvements over the retail planets, but it gets frustrating when you see these planets being used in other campaigns in completely different systems. I have seen a red Venus-like planet, a red Jupiter, satellites Callisto and Europa with various colors, and Mars being used repeatedly. With all of the various campaigns that have been created, I think it would be nice to enhance the scenery and provide some variety with these planets.

Right now I am working on a set of 8+ planets for Warzone, and I am sure there are plenty of other campaigns which need some high resolution planets, whether they are low-orbit or high-orbit views. If it is all possible, I think it would be great if we could collaborate with one another and provide a form of package or .vp which includes plenty of high resolution planets that can be used for FS. It might be a slow project since making planets is not on everyone's high priority list, but I think it would be worth the wait. What do you all think?

[Aardwolf]

OK here it is...

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l77/Aardwolf001/Planets/PlanetRender-1.png

Speaking of high-orbit vs. low-orbit, this one is meant to be pretty big (in the game I designed it for, it is rendered as a square with the center 1.5 units away from the camera and with side length of 2 units). Other distances may make the curvature look wrong.