any ideas on creating planet textures

[DamoclesX]

I"m talking like full photo real maps, I looked for some planet generators but couldnt find any

[randy s]

planets from sol or else where

[clatterton]

This should meet your needs:

http://www.flamingpear.com/lunarcell.html

It's a Photoshop plugin that generates whole planet maps.

Clay

[DamoclesX]

um wow


DAMNIT!

I thought I would be able to take today off.. but now.. i .. have... no... choice lol!!!

thanks!

[DamoclesX]

Oh ya, this works a lot better then hand drawing them.

[DamoclesX]

Both are in the narn system

[Duken]

Are you showing off the ship or the planet? [;)]

Seriously they both look awsome.

[EDIT]: Fixed Typo

[Pheonix Starflare]

Seriously...that looks amazing...its better than what's in some sci-fi channel movies....Wow.

[Pheagey]

ORIGINAL: Duken

Are you showing off the ship or the palnet? [;)]

Seriously they both look awsome.

ditto..except planet...not palnet

[spaceranger]

Yeah, I've been playing with Lunarcell and PS. If you generate a bump map, and use the land/sea mask to specify specularity, it works pretty well. It doesn't do lunar terrain (i.e. craters) too well, but I've found some settings that appear to work fairly well.

Here's one of my better renders ('rendered' in Orbiter, a free space sim):
http://img221.imageshack.us/my.php?image=orbiterbaihudeadwoodap3.png

I'm going to be working on planets/moons/gas giants for the SW Destiny mod this summer. For the lunar and gas giant textures, I'm going with straight up Photoshop because it's the easiest approach for me.

What I've been doing for the lunar textures is scraping large images from the web of real moons from our solar system (there's a number of spherically mapped textures out there) and hordes of 2D rock textures. Essentially, I'm slapping down a bunch of rock textures into an empty PS document and utilizing various filters and tools to composite them and create accompanying bump maps.

There's a number of PS tutorials about, here's a few:

http://www.solarvoyager.com/images/tutorials/splanet.jpg
http://www.solarvoyager.com/images/tutorials/gasgiant.jpg
http://www.skyhighgallery.com/how-to-planets.htm
http://www.solarvoyager.com/images/tutorials/splanet.jpg

Once I take a crack at textures for Starshatter this summer, I'll post a tutorial.

I've also done a lot of work on architecting realistic planetary masses/densities/orbital elements, etc. (for my work on an Orbiter addon), and I'll post some guidelines for defining systems that, for example, have habitable worlds in the actual habitable zone about a star. Note that not all star types can support life as we know it.

Actually, here's a couple handy tools for determining planetary elements:

Orbit Xplorer:
http://www.ottisoft.com/orbit_x.htm

StarGen:
http://home.comcast.net/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html

Astrosynthesis:
http://www.nbos.com/products/astro/astro-generator.htm

Something that looks like it might be handy, or at least fun, haven't checked it out yet though:
http://drtypo.free.fr/index.html

Cheers