how to make planet maps

Support Basics & Interface
1

I was wondeirng if anyone knew of a good tutorial on how to make planet maps. I would like to try and start making some original maps for animations that I’m working on.

Thanks
Chris

2

well…I’ve been hunting for one as well, but I have figured out two ways as of yet…

1: http://www.flamingpear.com/ has a plugin for Photoshop/PaintShopPro called “Luna Cell” creates planet maps. :slight_smile: (Not REALLY good, but good enough)

2: terragen. yes, terragen.
create a nice terrain, put your camera up WAYYYY high, set it so it looks down at full zoom. (You may have to raise it up higher, but full zoom prevents distortion. turn off clouds, set the lighting angle to 90*, and render at a high resolution.

inside gimp,PSP,PS, cut out the black space, then resize image to 1/2 the height, with the same width.

voila! planet map. you can also make spec maps by making the oceans white, and the land black (Takes a little work) and a heightmap by saving the terrain file as a “RAW” and opening in PSP/PS (Dunno if Gimp can open RAW files. then resize to 1/2 height.