I’m trying to create the first planet for my Star Wars movie. I’ve been able to find some information about rendering planets in Blender. I think I’ll be able to piece something together, but is there any place that has a straight forward tutorial for this?
Secondly, I’ve been able to find all sorts of textures for planets in this solar system, but the planets in my movie are supposed to be original. (Not seen in Star Wars movies either). Is there any good tut’s on creating decent planet textures from scratch (can use GIMP or PhotoShop)?
If you’re using GIMP or Photoshop, you can start with an existing planet texture as your guide. Terrestrial, Jovian, cratered rockball or iceball, etc.
Next, start a new image (or layer, even), and base the layout on your guide image. By this, I mean that patches of land need to be stretched out more near the top and bottom, and more condensed near the middle.
After you’ve got something that you like, just close the existing planet file or layer, and save it as your new planet.
Depending on the type of planet, you may also want to make bump maps and opacity maps. Clouds can be done as separate maps or as procedural textures.
Blender is sooooo cool. I use Blender-gerated planets in our planetarium shows here at work.
um, you could always just adjust the colours of existing planet maps. Or you could mix several together. That way they would fit properly, and look quite realistic.
From a suggestion on BlenderWars.com, I got a copy of FlamingPear’s LunarCell plug in for photoshop. It produces some pretty awesome, realistic looking planets, but the best part is you can export the textures so you can use them in 3d progs like Blender.
Anyone ever used this plugin before?
So anyway, I now have all these different textures for my “earth-like” planet but can’t seem to apply them and the material settings in blender correctly.
A few of the textures it outputs are:
Map Color (Including blue for oceans)
Land Bump
Ocean Mask
Cloud Mask
Cloud Bump
I’m not sure how to apply these to make them look realistic. And the material settings for this elude me as well.
Any examples on how to apply the materials and textures appropriately?
After modelling this subject is the very basis of all your future work in Blender. Your best course of action is to go to the sticky tutorial thread at the top of the page and look at the relevant tutorials. It may take you a day or two longer to produce a realistic planet but you’ll save yourself a lot more than two days up front. On pages two and three of that thread are some PDF’s and another one at Blender.org that have the kind of info that’ll clear up your bewilderment. All of us were there once and got past it.