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Local TutorialInteractive planet-creation tutorial

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  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Quick test ... maybe even post 5b ;)

    Underwater mining base color (will also transfer to night light map)

    render_05b.jpg
    Fig 5b. Underwater base test.

    Enjoy !

    //Dr. Asz
  • OzylotOzylot332 Posts: 0Member
    Woot!?! I wanna make one!! Way cool!
  • Very cool :)
  • ShiznaftShiznaft171 Posts: 0Member
    I have always wanted to see your work step by step. I have not seen many people that do custom planet maps with this quality. MORE PLEASE!!! :thumb:
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Not much time this weekend (yeap lost more of my hard earned money...) But here is some beginnings of shoreline, some shallow ocean features (basically extended the land palette and ocean-ified the color with a PS-blend). I also tried out some rock formations on the upper right quadrant of the crater. I guess things will begin to progress somewhat slowly now as most parts have to be hand-painted and textures copied in to be modified. Did I say that PS/GIMP blend feature are your best friend ?! If not, it is !

    Enjoy

    render_06.jpg
    Fig 6.1. Full planet render, only colormap and atmosphere. Test of various features and some rudimentary land texture.

    //Dr. Asz
  • Looks gorgeous and at the same time very tricky. Won't be easy, but I'll give the ocean floor a go :)
  • TinukedayaTinukedaya182 Posts: 271Member
    I just started to follow this great tut... I have no probs following all this drawing things. Great so far aszazeroth.

    One think I would like to ask though... How the hell shall I do the atmosphere effect you have on the planet of yours? I know it has something to do with falloff map? Where, how? Please enlighten me!
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
    Cruiser - SFS Suricata --- Freighter - SFS "Crate"
  • OzylotOzylot332 Posts: 0Member
    Wow.. very cool. I'd like to know a bit more about how you achieve the land textures, are they entirly hand painted?
    also wondering how you will get mountain ranges in there too.

    I too have difficulties simulating the atmosphere falloff.
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Tinukedaya wrote: »
    I just started to follow this great tut... I have no probs following all this drawing things. Great so far aszazeroth.

    One think I would like to ask though... How the hell shall I do the atmosphere effect you have on the planet of yours? I know it has something to do with falloff map? Where, how? Please enlighten me!

    Nice... always helps to have a knack for drawing...

    Right, the atmosphere. For this planet I shamelessly just copied some other planets atmosphere, but the basics are outlined in Deks' Earth tutorial. Depending a bit on your 3D software (I only know how to do this in Max or Maya) what you want to do is to have a fall-off that is dependent of shadow/light. The darker it gets, the more transparent the falloff should be. Then you map a gradient to the falloff that will be visible by the edge (or limb). In this case I do not really conform to a standard blue-green-white earth gradient, but rather have a more overall white tone. The falloff-gradient combo can then be applied to an atmosphere sphere (wierd wording, I know) slightly larger than the surface, -or- if you are not going so close or do not like massive fuzzyness, just blend it in with the surface-map. The later case will cause a -very- sharp edge though, but renders much faster for solarsystem type of animations/shots.

    Makes sense or ?! if not... keep asking.

    //Dr. Asz
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Ozylot wrote: »
    ...I'd like to know a bit more about how you achieve the land textures, are they entirly hand painted? also wondering how you will get mountain ranges in there too.

    Nah, not entirely handpainted... basis for the land texture (not the palette, that was truly painted) are stock photos of oxidized minerals ;) Then I blend and paint and clone and brush and .... Short... I zoom in and wander around with my tablet-brush trying to "create" features that I like. I do have a small collection of earlier work to lean upon, but most of the time each planet look pretty unique in the end. As for the falloff.... it's alot of parameter tweaking. I cannot before hand say what is working or not. Try it out, render some edge, look at NASA (Service mission 4, maybe) photos, change parameters, render again or use an IPR in maya. Get stuck !? post in the WIP thread and we can discuss.

    //Dr. Asz
  • TinukedayaTinukedaya182 Posts: 271Member
    Thanks Asz. I wasn't much smart from what you said. I understood, but it made no sense. Oh well. It made sense, but I wasn't able to make something up from just those few hints.

    BUT... one of the hints has proven vital. Deks.

    Now up for drawing some unique textures. :flippy:
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
    Cruiser - SFS Suricata --- Freighter - SFS "Crate"
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Tinukedaya wrote: »
    Thanks Asz. I wasn't much smart from what you said. I understood, but it made no sense. Oh well. It made sense, but I wasn't able to make something up from just those few hints.

    BUT... one of the hints has proven vital. Deks.

    Now up for drawing some unique textures. :flippy:

    Hmm, I am know to have that effect on people... my wife and kids always complains when I try to explain something :devil:

    Looking forward to them textures !
  • backsteptbackstept2018 Posts: 918Member
    I'm anxious to get on to ohw to do land details like mountains and rivers
    oh and clouds too :D

    come on come on come on
    yes I'm an impatient son of a gun :devil:
  • OzylotOzylot332 Posts: 0Member
    backstept wrote: »
    I'm anxious to get on to ohw to do land details like mountains and rivers
    oh and clouds too :D

    come on come on come on
    yes I'm an impatient son of a gun :devil:

    Indeed! ^^

    Ive started experimenting with a bump map, seems to work but ya cant see it from directly above. Im curious to see how the masters do it. :D
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Ah, again we embark on the journey of the quest for the grand prize, the creation of my first tutorial...

    Well first of, as you faithful followers probably have noticed, them PSD file are now in full swelling well above 400 Mb or more. Not really suitable for working with, so, at any point you feel like you have a nice map, do a "ctrl-a" and "copy merged" (will copy all your active/visible layers) and do a "file new". Paste the copy in and then drag-drop the alpha from the large file to the new. Vola, something along the lines of 119.17 Mb ;) two layers (one empty white bg, that you can throw) and the correct and so useful alpha.

    Back to painting.... painting and some more painting. Then for my planet I googled some pictures of oxidized rock and made some funky collage of some of their colors and a few surface details. A worthy note is to be darn careful when selecting surface features, since most photos are way off scale compared to orbital shots. Study some satellite pictures to get the feeling. Then.... paint and some more paint. I also try to paint in new layers and then experiment with the blending for interesting results. So without further due here is phase 2 of the entire surface-map.

    ScreenShot006.jpg
    Fig 7.1. Updated surface-map.

    I will now try to add some of the requested details, such as mountains (although my world is only expected to have few such) or I'll make a detour to another world of mine. Have not decided yet. 3D render pending... ran out of RAM trying to load the map ;)

    Cheers
    //Dr. Asz
  • OzylotOzylot332 Posts: 0Member
    Thats crazy and beautiful! :p and please... minor detour!
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Alright, some goodies from another planet map

    ScreenShot008.jpg
    Fig 8.1. Jungle-Kilimanjaro-Clone

    The mountain is made from copy-clone and re-painting some Norwegian mountain from some aerial over a fjord I found trying to study Slartibart's finest work. Esentially I wanted to have a mountain rise above the Jungle in a LPO (Low-Planet-Orbit) shot. Guess I have to render that shoot someday ;)

    ScreenShot009.jpg
    Fig 8.2. Part of mountain massive.

    The mountain massive was intended to be apart of my whopping 16k Vulcan map (still unfinished) based upon canonical records and sources. It was made from a medium rez BlueMarble picture-outtake of mountain massive located somewhere in South America (exact location eludes me). All original colors where stripped and new, painted and blended in.

    newtoy4.jpg
    Fig 8.3. Final(-ish) render of the above mountain massive.

    We'll come back to these when addressing them bump-maps. Gonna see about getting some river shots too, if I can find the darn planet with the river ;)

    Cheers
    //Dr. Asz
  • backsteptbackstept2018 Posts: 918Member
    wow
    I dunno if I'll ever be able to do something like that :D
  • lennier1lennier1913 Posts: 1,280Member
    @aszazeroth: That´s some seriously great progress and it´s already given me quite a few ideas. I especially like how you blend together the different climates and make it feel natural.
    @backstept: Don´t forget that he didn´t exactly start doing maps like these yesterday morning. ;)
  • OzylotOzylot332 Posts: 0Member
    Fantastic!
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Thanks guys.... and yeap as Lennier1 said... this has been a long journey and it is not over yet ;)
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Sometimes you just gonna have to look what your planet might look like in a render. Quickie with an old (only 8k) cloudmap and the famous alpha as them specular-mask. No bump and most noticeably no land-specular, which usually liven up the continents and make the land less flat looking. Tweaked the atmosphere to a more green-ish hue due to well, more oxygen or something quasi-physics like that.

    Enjoy

    render_07.jpg
    Fig 9.1 Another test-render

    //Dr. Asz
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Some starters on the bump-map then. Still very general stuff and mostly filter-ized. I used the alpha to select the landmasses, new layer, and dropped a inner-glow layer effect. This will then be the overall coastal line profile, in my case inspired by some nice photos of Aussie coast. Unfortunately my darn PS crashed on me so I have no screencaps, but towards the bottom of the inner-glow there is a profile selector that also let's you configure your own profile. So I made a shoreline-steep as h3ll slope-flat top kindof profile. Add some jitter to that for a jagged appearance and make sure you choose white instead of egg-shell-yellow that's default. Apply and if you are working 8k or above... go for a coffe. So now you have the beginnings of a funky bump map. I then added (still land selected) some "cloud+diff cloud x4" render. That adds some perlin inspired ridges. Then I blended in a contrast enhanced colormap and desaturated the whole thing. Ready for a test drive.

    large_render.jpg
    Fig 10.1 Test drive of the rudimentary bump-map.

    For all intended purpose, I guess we can stop here if we just want orbital, full planet shots..... but where is the fun with that :devil: The next phases are the ones that adds "human" decided detail to the map, where I intend to break away from the filter generated look and start exploring the world, below.

    Cheers
    //Dr.Asz

    [I will try go back and take some screenshots later]
  • backsteptbackstept2018 Posts: 918Member
    truespace can't handle 8k sized maps like you're working with so I've been doing it 4096 by whatever

    for my planet I used a couple big textures and faded one on top of the other at 50% opacity to sortof combine them and set that as a pattern stamp
    the textures I used were metal crystals (like a sheet of steel) and ground (dirt, leaves, branches, dead wood etc)
    I'm at school now, but when I have time to work on it I'll use different base patterns for the different climate regions
  • OzylotOzylot332 Posts: 0Member
    Damn thats beautiful. Im gonna have to do some stuff to keep up with this.
  • backsteptbackstept2018 Posts: 918Member
    Ozylot wrote: »
    Damn thats beautiful. Im gonna have to do some stuff to keep up with this.
    ditto :D
  • aszazerothaszazeroth176 Posts: 209Member
    Especially for Backstept... my first ever 3D planet render...

    Arrakis, Truespace 2-something
  • backsteptbackstept2018 Posts: 918Member
    nice :D

    my first ever planet render was using the default windows 95 clouds desktop mapped on a sphere, and I also used the same tex as a bump map, so the clouds appeared miles and miles high :shiner:
    then I blurred the whole thing because I thought it was too much, so I was left with a blue blurry mess
    haha
    I'll see if I can post it later
  • TinukedayaTinukedaya182 Posts: 271Member
    Alright. After a LONG time I found myself trying to finnish my planet again. Although after loosing my patience when waiting 5 second to every action to appear, I had to decrease the res of the map to just 4k.

    Now i'm in the stage when I trying to reproduce the Decks tutorial and I found out I do not have any suitalbe Cloud map. I thought abot making me one, but the reslts were no good. So, Asz... think you might give us some hints? I guess you are doing them alone as well eh?

    Thanks in advance... If I find the WIP thread that was associated with this tut, i shall post my result so far. ;)
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
    Cruiser - SFS Suricata --- Freighter - SFS "Crate"
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