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How to create a "earth type" planet texture


Midgetalien

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Hey there, this is my first tutorial so bare with me! let me know

of any mistakes or how terrible it is!

so lets begin!

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firstly find a land texture that you are going to use as your base. This could be cracked earth,

lumpy terrain, ect.... for the basis of this tutorial i will be using this texture found via google:

595483_land_texture.jpg

ok start off by opening paint.net to a 800x600 canvas. open a new layer and put your basic

texture on to it. As you may notice, it may be too small. BUT thats ok. Just copy and paste

untill the whole canvas is filled up. you should have something like this:

terra1.jpg

As you can see from mine there are plenty of seams. But dont worry about fixing this up,

it will be a waste of time as they dont become noticable later on.

next create a new layer and fill this in green (not a bright green). Set the layer opacity between

85 - 90% ( i used 80) what this does is it gives a green tint to the texture. We are trying to

create an "earth like planet texture" so some green is needed. You should have something lik this:

terra2-1.jpg

Thats the easy part over and done with! Next wee are going to add water to our planet texture.

creat a new layer and call this "water". Now with the paintbrush tool, select a meduim blue colour

and begin outlining your oceans and lakes. For rivers i reconmend using a brush width between 1 and 4

pixels. Eventually you should have something like this:

terra3.jpg

Now create a new layer and call it "deep water". The idea here is to select a darker shade of blue and then

paint, in the middle of your large water areas (lakes and oceans) to create the sense of deep water. Keep

away from the shore line! You will see why in a second.

Once you have your deep water areas, apply a fragment blur with the settings: count 4, distance 8.

after this, apply an average blur of a strength between 8 and 10 ( i normally use 10). You should have something like this:

terra4.jpg

We now have deep water, yay! But we need a shore line. So create a new layer and call this "shore water". Take the

paintbrush tool with a pixel width of between 6 - 8 and map out your shorline, following the origonal shape of your water.

What your aiming for is to put the shoreline at the edge of your water. Once you have finished add a fragment blur of 4, 8 again and then add an average blur of 10.

you should have something like this:

terra5.jpg

Now we want to add some climate to the texture, not much though. Create a new layer and call this "yellow". On this layer

create a yellow eclipse accross the centre of your texture, keeping well away from the top and bottom edges. Erase any pats that go over any water (including rivers). you should have something like this:

terra6.jpg

But what a mess! open up the "yellow" layers properties and change the blend mod to overlay. Next change the opacity to 35. The yellow blob becomes almost invisible, but yet adds a strange sense of climate to the picture:

terra7.jpg

Now lets create some atmosphere! Create a new layer and call this "clouds". Change your prmary colour to black with a transparancy of 0. Have your secondary colour as white. Now go to effect -> render -> clouds. You can play with the cloud settings but i find these to be good ones: Scale 535, roughness 0.65.

you should have something like this:

terra8.jpg

....and your done! All finished, you now have an "earth like texture" for your planet :)

Of course dont stop there! You could try adding in some icecaps:

Terratexturefinish.jpg

So what can you do with this texture? create a planet of course!

Heres my finished planet:

Terra.jpg

Feel free to post your attempts, i hope the tutorial was easy to follow and to understand :)

=MA=

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Nice one, hope it was 100% PDN, the texture on the planet looks very good.
firstly find a land texture that you are going to use as your base. This could be cracked earth,

lumpy terrain, ect.... for the basis of this tutorial i will be using this texture found via google:

:?

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Nice one, hope it was 100% PDN, the texture on the planet looks very good.

Everything apart from the basic texture is all PDN. I supose it could be possible to even create a basic land texture in PDN to work from.

Essentially i use a base texture and work up from that. so its about 85-90% PDN

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hmmm maybe my concrete texture tutorial could be applied to this :wink:

 

"Clearly it's a very serious and literal meaning. If you're not solving physics equations then get off my lawn!-Rick Brewster Paint.net Lead Developer"

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Its good, but shouldnt it go into the texture tuts?

Yup, thats a good place for it.

hmmm possibly, how do i get it moved?

The newest Moderator to the rescue!

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To remove seams, you could play around with the tile image plugin to fix it slightly, or you could just resize the whole thing and try sharpening it when it comes out blurry.

Anyway, I'm bookmarking this. Some good planet textures are what I really need now... good part about the clouds too!

Signature pending.

Until then feel free to criticize my current signature by PMing me.

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This is a really great idea, but if you use "Distort > Dents" on the water, you get a much cooler effect.

Like I did on the texture. Its only the red parts. UIt waves around the grey land

slyor64_planet-thing.png

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This is a really great idea, I'm really happy for you, Imma let you finish

but if you use "Distort > Dents" on the water, you get a much cooler effect. but Dents had one of the best effects of all time.

Like I did on the texture. Its only the red parts. One of the best effects of all time!

OK, Kanye.

:roll:

xZYt6wl.png

ambigram signature by Kemaru

[i write plugins and stuff]

If you like a post, upvote it!

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Good job dude. If only someone could recreate Pandora where a whole bunch of blue people run around! ;)

All your images are belong to us

original.png

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I dont think this is making a texture, all you doing here is copying a texture from a real photo :/

But overall i think the outcome is very realistic the clouds add a good depth too it :)

NINjasiggy-1.jpg~original

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Everything apart from the basic texture is all PDN. I supose it could be possible to even create a basic land texture in PDN to work from.

Yes, it is completely possible to create a basic land texture. If you make several at once, you can build a world map with rougher and smoother terrain as well, which is how I build my maps all the time. It's a little involved, using Clouds, Levels, Threshold, Alpha Mask, Gradient Mapping, and if you want to, Shape 3D. (And yes, I promise I'll post it, I just need to check on a kid and make sure she's asleep first.)

I have to agree with someone else who suggested that this isn't really a tut for how to make a "texture" - but I do really like your ideas for crafting maps. They work!

Cheers!

Heather

ETA: You know what, it's easier just to give you the link to the tutorial I posted back in 2009 over at the Cartographer's Guild. Pretty much everything is identical, so it should still work just fine.

World maps with PDN

Cheers!

Heather

Edited by PeaceHeather
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