MAKING A CUSTOM M-CLASS PLANET Okay, well this is my first real tutorial, and it might show, but this is just to give you a basic idea of the principles, so that when the time comes you can take this and perfect it to your own needs. I ll be presuming a fair chunk most likely to cut down the written process for this tutorial to try to keep things as brief as possible tuts for some of the processes stated in this tutorial are available on other sites throughout the web so I won t be outlining them here. Before I go any further, I must state that this is a technique largely based from other tutorials out on the web and in particular Bonavello from deviantart. As stated in his tutorial, English is not his first language, so this is more a full English adaptation, and credit and thanks should also go to him. PHOTOSHOP (AND WEB) Let s begin by racking up some images to be used. As you may know, for a planet to look decent out of a 3D application, you need several images dealing with the base colour, specularity, bump, and clouds. While some tutorials are based on terraforming Mars or other real planets, this will ultimately still limit you on use, and we really want to make it so that you can create a near unlimited amount of planet maps to use. So you need to get something to help you out in Photoshop; some brushes: http://bonvanello.deviantart.com/art/land-brushes-307837333 To get any kind of closeness to the planet atmosphere, you re going to need to make a fairly high resolution image; however this also lays down the most work for you. Start by making a new image (say 8,000 x 4,000 pixels at least). Now the best way to get a real looking surface for the base colour layer is to grab several images from either Google Earth, or the NASA Visible Earth website (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/). Essentially what you want here is to search out high altitude shots of land masses to paste into your image area in Photoshop, like this:
From here, just go to the Edit menu, and select Auto-Blend Layers, then select Panorama. You might also want to use the Clone tool to mask out the odd cloud and other detail you don t want, or wish to add upon. Once done, you should end up with something like this: This is not the only way. For the example image (in the title and the end), I just grabbed an image of the Mars surface, and recoloured it to get more of a deep green colour, then highlighted a rough area in the middle (along the equatorial line) and coloured it more of a brown/yellow for deserts. As this was only a test, I did not make any polar ice caps, but you may wish to for added realism. Now that we have a nice base surface texture, we need to get going on some land masses. Add a new layer and after adding the brushes linked above, start placing some land areas. The best way of doing this, is think about the world map of Earth, and start placing continents and islands, and generally let your creativity run wild. Here s the one I used for the example: Pretty unremarkable really, I know, but this was only an experiment. We also need to do some planning ahead, so duplicate the Land Texture layer and label it Land Texture Blurred as we ll need it to make the oceans later on. Once you re happy with the continents you ve made, go ahead and create a layer mask on the Land Texture layer. You can do this by just dragging the Land Texture layer to the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel.
Now select the Land Shapes layer and press Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C to copy the layer. We now need to paste this layer into the layer mask we just created. Press Alt (this is important) and click the layer mask. If you ve done this correctly, the image should turn white. Now just hit Ctrl+V to paste the Land Shapes into the layer mask if you deselect the Land Shapes and the Land Texture Blurred layers, you should now see something like this: Great! But still, most oceans aren t white, so let s remedy that. Right-click on the Background layer and select Layer from Background. Label it Ocean, and fill it with a nice blue colour you can have any colour you want really, but since we re going for an M-class planet, we ll just stick with blue for now. This looks strange though as there s no variations to account for any depth. To get around this, we ll go back to our Land Texture Blurred layer, and set it to Overlay. Eww, that looks awful on mine and gives a really green tinge to the image this is obviously personal preference but I decided to Desaturate the layer to get a much more blue hue. Next blur the layer (using the Gaussian Blur option under Filters), until you get something like this:
While this may not look technically correct, it should be reasonable enough for the base colour plate to be used in texturing. However some of the ocean looks to be washing out (pun intended) some of the land mass, so let s highlight some of the coastal regions. For this, add a new layer. Next, make the background colour black, and the foreground colour white, then alternate select Filters->Render->Clouds and Filters->Render->Difference Clouds, until you have something like this: Next we should probably colourise this a bit to make it more sea worthy, so add a Gradient Map to it (under the Image/Adjustments menu) from black to green/turquoise, and set the layer to Color. Now, add a new layer mask (using the same direction as before) and copy the land shapes there. Then add some Gaussian Blur to the swirly-ness and with some extra colourisation to the ocean layer, you should get something like this: The effect is not that noticeable, but it should be enough to highlight some of the coasts further. And that s it.
Or is it well, sure, we now have the base colour map. But we now need to expand the image collection a little so we can add it to the 3D model. We can get most of the other maps needed with just some layer selections. For the bump map, we can create this from the Land Texture (with the layer mask obviously) as the only viewable layer, and Desaturate it, then just play with the brightness and contrast controls to give it a more neutral grey tone, because while we want some form of mountain ranges, high ground, valley s variations, we don t want to make the lush green fertile areas look like the face of the moon. Mine looks like this: This is a bit too much in some places, but as stated before, this was only a test to see how it all turns out; doing it yourself, you can do it a lot better and spend more time on things. For the spec map, this is pretty easy. Since we only want the oceans to have a spec lighting hit, we can just take the Land Shapes layer, Invert it so the land masses are black on a white background, then Gaussian blur the image by just a few pixels dependent on the resolution you re working with, and this should be fine. The last thing before we move on into the 3D application is the cloud map. This is one of the hardest things to source a decent version of, although I know there are some good resources out there which offer things of this nature. The quickest and easiest is to Google e43_cloud_8k and this will get you a nice 8,000 pixel cloud map, so you just need to save this. Note: A while ago, I found a group of nice 8k maps that gave you more options, to enable your planets to not look too similar using the same cloud map image, and unfortunately, I now cannot find it again. If I ever locate this site again, or get pointed to any other resources like it, I ll add the links in here. 3D APPLICATION For the 3D application part, I m going to be using Lightwave 3D from Newtek, but these details can be adapted to any number of other applications, including the freely available Blender.
To start, we need the planet made in Modeler, so go ahead and open that up. This is one of the easiest models to build, and for it I personally like to use Tessellation spheres to minimise any segmentation you do still need to use some fairly high numbers though dependent on how close you want to get. Go ahead, and create a sphere using the ball tool, select Tessellation with 50 segments, and a size of 1000km on all axes. While this is not a true reflection on size of a real planet, it should be large enough so get some realistic camera and perspective views especially in animation. Duplicate the sphere into another layer. Using the size tool, increase its size slightly by 0.01%. Duplicate this sphere into the third layer and perform the same action with the size tool. Lastly, give each of these spheres surfaces names surface, clouds, and atmosphere seem logical then of course, save the object. That s it for Modeler; open your planet object in Layout, and open the Surfaces editor. We ll start with the planet s surface since that s the most in depth. In saying that, all of these surfaces are fairly selfexplanatory. Apply the image maps that you have created earlier in the Color, Specularity, and Bump sections, using a spherical projection on the Y axis, then click Automatic Sizing for each. For Specularity I have reduced the opacity to 65% to reduce the effect, and likewise the Bump map to 10% mainly owing my lack of preparation on the image map used. We need to also change some of the default values: Diffuse Set this to 90%. Nothing is 100% affected by light. Specularity Set to 0% if not already, as we ll just use the map for this. Glossiness Set this to 25%. I find this makes a good compromise between a pool ball and a complete gloss wash out. Reflection This is optional, but I have set mine to 1%. Keep this very low however; dependent on the effect you re going for. Bump To 25%. Next is the clouds sphere. This one is fairly similar to set up, just placing your cloud map in the Color, Transparency, and Bump texture panels, and similarly as before, set it to spherical mapping, on the Y axis, and Automatic sizing. Again we have to change some of the default values: Diffuse To 90% as before. Specularity Set this to 5%. This is not really necessary but it can give some punch to the final product. Glossiness To 0%. Transparency I personally don t like the clouds to be completely transparent, so I set this to 60%.
The atmosphere is probably the layer that will require most tweaking to be acceptable and these settings laid out below are only guidance for you to continue on and experiment with, but they are good enough to allow you to make some pretty decent renders. As pictures speak a thousand words as the saying goes, I ll detail the settings with just images:
Despite not giving you all the values to these keys, what it shown should be enough to make some determinations on what to put where. The final thing to note for the atmosphere is to ensure that it is set to glow, and to make sure that glow is turned on in the scene parameters too. Last but not least, drop it into a scene with a starfield or a star lit backdrop and hit F9! I hope you ve enjoyed this tutorial and find it useful.