How to make a terra planet (with lights)

[noahintergalactic]

This tutorial is available as a PDF. Click here to view or download it

*you will need Shape 3D for this

This is a mix of other planet tutorials, but it has its uniqueness in how the map is created, and the lights on the night side of the planet. Hopefully you think it's a cool effect as well.

The end product here should look like this:

Okay, this is a tutorial to make a Terra planet (like earth) with lights. If you so desire, you can look at other space scape tutorials for things like nebulae or a star but this will only focus on making the actual planet. Okay, start with a black background and add noise.

Now, in a new layer, make a linear gradient with a blue and white (it doesn't really matter what shade of blue)

Easy enough so far. Now render > clouds: Choose your own roughness and scale, but you should set the blend mode to screen

This part requires a bit of work. Now you want to use the paint bucket at about 5-12%. Start in the middle with green, then work your way to the edges from green >different green > blue >different blue > white blue > white. You can make this pattern more or less simple with any colors that you want. You should end up close to this

This part may or may not take a long time for you. using Shape 3D you want to kind of eclipse your planet. You will have to mess with the x/y/z coordinates yourself, but this is what I used for the lighting (see image)and set the anti alias(AA) to 5.

Now that we are finished with that, you need to make 3 new layers. 1 below your planet, 2 above. Select the area outside your planet with the magic wand tool

And in the layer above it, fill white on the outside of where the planet is and vice versa on the layer below. use a Gaussian blur (radius around 15) on both *while they are deselected*

After you have blurred them to satisfaction, select the outside of the planet again (in the planet layer) and delete the large amount of white in the layer above your planet.

Now, in the empty layer at the top you are going to make clouds (in black and white) make them however you want, and switch the blend mode to screen. Then in the layer properties, switch the blend mode to screen.

Now, use a linear gradient half clear, half black and make the clear side on the day side, dark side on the night side (which is covered in clouds, now) and merge it on top of the clouds.

Now, for the lights. this is pretty simple. in the darkest part (not the grey area) use the lasso tool and pretty much scribble with it until it looks satisfyingly messy. Then add noise inside the selected area at 0 saturation, 100 intesity and 4 coverage. Then [ctr+F] one or two times without deselecting.

Now, in the grey area do the same thing, but without using [ctr+F]

Now, you are done (unless you want to add things from other space scape tuts.) and when you deselect, hopefully it will look something like this:

[noahintergalactic]

this is the same thing, but I used a gaussian blur on the map before shape 3D

[delpart]

You need to resize those images to fit the posting rules ... and run back through and consider the capitalization of sentences etc. While I've become accustom to the texting crowd's avoidance of these sorts of things, folks tend to think there is something missing etc when it's formated in this fashion. Regardless of what you are conveying, it can get discounted pretty quickly by not conforming some to standard sentence construction rules. You may also want to break up the space a little etc to make it less difficult to read through, but that's more cosmetic in nature ...

Consider putting in why you made this tutorial or what's key to it being an addition to the many other available ones ... Getpaint.net custom Google search for Planet Tutorial

Also you are missing links to the plugin(s) needed ...

Only thing from a cursory overview would be to ensure to mention the AA setting in shape 3D as well to avoid that unnecessary jaggy you've got showing ...

Strong potential for creating matched city glow to potential texture areas here btw. That seems to be the distinction really.

Edited January 28, 2012 by delpart

[noahintergalactic]

So, I capitalized my sentences, and added my AA settings, but how do I make the pictures small? I know that normally you click and they get big, but how do I do that (I apologize, making tutorials isn't something I do a lot. I just thought this was a cool effect.)

[delpart]

Cool, thanks for jumping in on it. This will hopefully keep the mods needing less antacids today for a start ...

Image size: The best way is to consider cropping or hosting the images in a smaller format to start with if you wish for them to be represented here that large. The maximum size has to be 800x600 vs 1024x768. The best way to probably ensure your images are going to be the correct size to help with the illustration without requiring someone to click on 160x sized thumbnails is to redo them or use Photobucket's editor to batch resize the lot down to 800x. For this tutorial's methods, what needs to shown, etc. I dont think you really need to have thumbnails to full sized images for the most of it.

Having just tested a few of them, some of the detail that may need to be seen will get lost ...

Somewhere with the BBCode tags for images in posts there is a way to more or less auto-restrict the size displayed ... Not sure if it can be done here. I'll test that once I find the reference for it again in a few minutes. The problem there of course is whether or not that is considered creating a thumbnail or not by the mods.

*** (Not trying to nit-pick mate. Just trying to be helpful to get your content to match the requirements list for the tutorials. I hate seeing locked tutorials here as even a duplicate could potentially morph into something great with help from the community a lot of times. Requires a lot on everyone's part, not just the author. I'm a big Stone Soup Group fan, so maybe I'm a little warped in that respect.

The lights on the dark side is worth the distinction here for sure and can be blended in, colored a little, etc to give a really great effect for people pushing the idea to the far ends of the spectrum.)

[delpart]

Well, I cant get this board to parse the extra IMG tag variables ...

People are less likely to click on the smaller thumbnails depending. You'll probably want to come up with another set of resized images for this or just consider resizing the current ones and seeing how it looks.

Even though a lot more people coming through here may have 1920x or higher resolution displays, the idea is to consider people with less bandwidth and screen real estate. Again, this tutorial for the most part will not suffer from working smaller. One thing if you do decide to redo the images is to not run PDN full screen and selectively position and capture only the floating tool-bars needed for a step. History in most cases can be left out, but consider layers etc.

(Yes, all of this should have been in the above reply, but since I already made the error with my shaky hands to create a double post, I'm using it ...)

Edited January 28, 2012 by delpart

[noahintergalactic]

 Okay, all resized and hopefully ready :b I used 800 horizontal so that should meet specs. thanks for the advice it was really helpful (:

Edited January 28, 2012 by noahintergalactic

[pdnnoob]

Why the heck didn't I think of this before?

Now I have to go combine this with three other planet tutorials and things I've tried...let's see what I come up with

[nitenurse79]

I have added this tut to my bookmarks. It looks awesome and I am sure I will do this very soon. top marks to you noah great work

[delpart]

Another side note, you could almost use that line noise method to create custom constellations ...

And of course, for the ultimate sci-fi planet you can create more geometric shapes for the city lighting and ensure it matches up with S3D a little depending on the scale of things. Idea being that cities wouldn't be as formed chaotically or organically as we tend to do it right now ...

[barbieq25]

Noahintergalactic, & Delpart, I have enjoyed reading the interaction & assistance between the 2 of you. Well done!

Tute writing is not easy & I do like the effect that your planet gives. Thanks so much for sharing! Bookmarked for later.

[noahintergalactic]

I just took deltaparts advice and it came out very well! have a look

[Ego Eram Reputo]

... This will hopefully keep the mods needing less antacids today for a start ...

I have extra strength antacids on hand < that's not me laughing, that's me trying to swallow one!

[nitenurse79]

My try. Not quite the same outcome but okish

[jim100361]

[nitenurse79]

Good result jim I will have to try again. I can't understand why my day side is not blurry

[jim100361]

Good result jim I will have to try again. I can't understand why my day side is not blurry

Thanx for the comments.

I deviated a bit from the tutorial. Once you do the layers creating the glow, return to the actual planet layer. I can't give you specifics because I did not annotate them at the time, but you can toy around with blur, and brightness/contrast, and even the Hue to vary the result. When I created the black/white clouds, I applied the same shape3d effect as I did to the planet (I figured "why not? They're encapsulating the planet anyways). When that was done, again you can toy with rendering and opacity on that layer (the clouds will blur it out a bit too - which is why I needed to toy with the opacity on that layer: so it wasn't too heavy).

Sorry I'm not more helpful with details.

And here's a further modification of the first:

[delpart]

Good result jim I will have to try again. I can't understand why my day side is not blurry

When Shape3D doesn't blur out some things in the wrap/warp as it normally seems to, you have to consider doing it before you run that on the texture. A slight amount of medium and a pinch of blur (direction or Gaussian) looks like it would blend that texture approach better. I'll make one and see what happens I guess as right now I'm going from text to mental image and comparing with the screen shots ...

[jim100361]

Here's the "Planet"

After the planet is created, create the clouds and do the Shape3D as you did w/the planet

Adjust the Opacity to your liking. The clouds will blur the layer below a bit.

[delpart]

@NN: What Jim shows is the easier way to go about it rather than doing a whole layer with a selection to delete.

Not sure but looking at yours it almost looks like you deleted the wrong part of the selection unless you were intended to add the clouds to the starscape, it should have been on the planet part ... But without the layers to see what's happen its a guess based on what my eyes are telling.

Just ran through trying to get paint-bucket to behave itself trying to match your colors/spreads to some degree to see if I could start near that ... even the the fast and dirty ones with some random fills are blurring out a little flatter, but its that haze/glow layer that does it to the that sort of pattern. You're essentially blending an semi-opaque texture in with the planet "surface" when doing it this way. And not matter what I keep thinking, from space, or this sort of distance perspective, you rarely can see shadow under them etc. Plus it adds that ethereal feel ...

Oh and at first of course I didn't reset my S3D from playing with a few other things and that definitely left things looking more distinct than I liked.

What seems to throw most on these from looking them over is either getting the base texture correct or the glow/halo/shadowing of the planetoids ... Refinement comes from there it seems.

[jim100361]

Not sure but looking at yours it almost looks like you deleted the wrong part of the selection unless you were intended to add the clouds to the starscape, it should have been on the planet part ... But without the layers to see what's happen its a guess based on what my eyes are telling.

If this statement is to me, then yes, I didn't include as part of the starscape in my first finished piece, but maybe this will be better:

So essentially, 2 cloud layers. One done as the Shape3D and another for the starscape for the picture above.

And a little AA would be helpful too! lol

Edited January 29, 2012 by jim100361

[nitenurse79]

I followed this tut all the way along, but I guess I got lost again I will re-visit very soon and follow both delparet and jim's work arounds

[nitenurse79]

This time I got a better result

[RedBeard]

I just took deltaparts advice and it came out very well! have a look

Dude, I can totally see the potential here for creating awesome techno-heavy planets, like Coruscant. Nicely done!

[Mr.Bobert]

I've been experimenting with this same technique recently, I didn't know someone else had already thought of it Nice work, though I would suggest setting the lights layer to additive, you won't see those black dots on the bright side.