Creation of a City Planet

[Aysel]

Hi,

I've taken some time to follow some tutorials and I think I've become pretty decent at making planets over all. However, I decided to try and create a city planet, but I don't know exactly how to execute it. By city planet, I mean something that looks like Coruscant from Star Wars. I've tried making circular and ovular patters, but they don't turn out right when I render the 3d effect. Also, the texture just doesn't seem to come out as smooth as the one in the picture.

Any advice or tutorials?

[Lance McKnight]

Try this tutorial at deviant Art City Lights Tutorial.

You may have to use Simon Brown's CustomBrush Mini plug-in to use some of the brush stroke in the tutorial. I'll help you if I can. Two other good space artists to ask for help are Commander Sozo and Goonfella, both of them are masters.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Cheat like hell: + LunarCell filter for nearly effortless planet creation.

This plugin is very cool!

[Aysel]

Try this tutorial at deviant Art City Lights Tutorial.

You may have to use Simon Brown's CustomBrush Mini plug-in to use some of the brush stroke in the tutorial. I'll help you if I can. Two other good space artists to ask for help are Commander Sozo and Goonfella, both of them are masters.

I tried it out, but since it's a photoshop tutorial, there are a few things I simply cannot do. I tried playing around with the city satellite images and pull the lighting from the picture, but it's still a far cry from what I'm shooting for, which is a planet that resembles Coruscant. I'll keep playing around with the effects, though.

Cheat like hell: http://forums.getpai...pdn-2011-12-26/ + LunarCell filter for nearly effortless planet creation.

This plugin is very cool!

This plug-in is nice, but it does lack some features that allow the user to fully customize the image. It also doesn't give the same satisfaction of actually constructing your own planet because the program practically renders the whole thing for you. But I suppose if you just want something quick, it's the way to go.

[Lance McKnight]

I tried it out, but since it's a photoshop tutorial, there are a few things I simply cannot do. I tried playing around with the city satellite images and pull the lighting from the picture, but it's still a far cry from what I'm shooting for, which is a planet that resembles Coruscant. I'll keep playing around with the effects, though.

I know what Coruscant is, I'm a Star Wars fan myself, and I believe that Photoshop tutorial is probably one of the best to do. Have you looked through the Creation tutorial sub-forum? There's a nifty planet tutorial created by Flip, and it teaches you how to create a planet texture from scratch, and then combine with a Photoshop-adapted tutorial, it can be done.

[NinjaManDan21]

Combine planet tut with Crop circle things before applying Shape-3D to each as separate layers, then just use the blend mode that looks best.

[jim100361]

I can't seem to get close enough to what you've provided. But, I'll offer you these and if you're interested, then I'll give you a little insight into them:

Edited February 12, 2012 by jim100361

[delpart]

Adjust the camera angle down and use Plane map scalable to adjust the texture to get that sort of false perspective from the example given. That rendering doesn't take planet (sphere) curvature into account as much as it should for those circles on a curved plane. Its a false perspective of what it "should" look like. Though those two things with Shape 3D should allow you to convert a texture with regular circles to better fit.

In some case you may wish to even try warping the texture first with Polar Transformation, and then wrap that with Shape 3D to get a closer match.

As for the texture itself? Lots of ways to probably get there on that. But it will take a bit of experimentation to dial in what you want. Main thing will be to need multi versions of it to figure out how to get the blend to not blur it out too far when adding coronal effects and distance haze of course.

Hope that helps some.

[Lance McKnight]

I'll readily admit it's not the best work coming from me, it's tough to replicate the Photoshop tutorial, but I don't concede to Photoshop. I downloaded Google Earth and randomly picked a spot on the globe and luckily found a major metropolis that had a lot of road and highway. It took some tinkering for me to get this, but I made this.

I did this as a point that you can use PDN to create a city planet with just a bit of patience, sweat, and few choice words.

[Aysel]

Okay, so I decided to come back to this thread after some time to figure out what I wanted to do and other works (I don't really consider this a dead thread because I created it and am still using it). I still haven't figured out exactly how to make anything that looks exactly like Coruscant, but decided that it would probably be best to create something loosely based off of it. To get the city image, I read over the Photoshop tutorial provided by Lance McKnight and used the idea of city lights to create a basis for a look. But instead of using Photoshop (because I don't have it) I used AlphaSpace and Grim Color Reaper to extract the lighting from the images that I wanted to use. I also took the advice of Delpart and played around with the Shape3D settings. I also coupled the design with Goonfella's Realistic Earth model and Sozo's Glow model. The colors I chose for the night time lighting are a reflection of what I'd like that particular species to prefer, which seems to dominate the image. But, for the sake of the idea as a whole, I decided to leave it. So, here is the image I created.

If you'd like to see a larger version: City Planet

Edited April 16, 2012 by Aysel

[Aysel]

You may have to use Simon Brown's CustomBrush Mini plug-in to use some of the brush stroke in the tutorial.

That's if I make a tutorial. I think the planet looks nice as a finished product. But, to be quite honest, it's still a prototype. Until I can perfect it, I'll let someone a little more seasoned make a tutorial for it haha. However, if I do figure it out, I'll be more than happy to show you exactly how I did it.