Planet Practice

[darthvader]

I was watching The Universe on the History Channel and it made me wonder about what other planets would look like, so I made a nice green looking one.

All made in Terragen 2
Detail: 1
AA: 20

constructive criticism is welcome and much appreciated 

http://gannaingh32.deviantart.com/art/Planet-Practice-92766815

[cyphyr]

Sweet, very good Maybe add a few mountain ranges and break up the green mottling somewhat. Is that "real" water (ie water shader_ or did you fake it ?
Richard

[old_blaggard]

Are the clouds procedural or an image mask?  If they're procedural, you simply must share the secret with us .

[rcallicotte]

The whole thing looks pretty good, but I would like more crispness (contrast?) to appear to be in deep space.

[nvseal]

If those clouds are procedural then they are the best planetery clouds ever made in TG 2. Are they procedural?

[darthvader]

The water is a surface layer restricted by altitude which i plugged into a water shader to give it the propor reflectiveness...so in a way it is real water,  but also is fake I wish I could be the creator of some amazing procedural cloud  layout but alas it is only an image map that I hacked up in photoshop.

Any lack of crispness could be a result of me lightening up the image in photoshop as my images tend to be on the dark side as I usually use a laptop that has a more luminous screen than PC's.

[Blonderator]

If those clouds are procedural then they are the best planetery clouds ever made in TG 2. Are they procedural?

Haha you were worried that someone might have almost out-performed you in procedural clouds. 



To OP, It's a great image. It is too bright though - when you turn up brightness in Photoshop like that, you lose image information by reducing the contrast a ton.

If you need to brighten up an image, use curves. That's what I do - it makes most images look a little better. Just my 2 cents. I think this image didn't need the post brightening.

[darthvader]

on the next one I'll give you both unbrightened and brightened shots.

As for the mountains I'm having some trouble; whenver I put in a displacement fractal for the mountains the negative displacement always goes below sea level resulting in a bunch of annoying little lakes. Does anybody know a way to merge the mountain fractal with the planet terrain in a way to only get the positive displacement? I've tried messing around with the merge shader but none of my solutions seem to work out

[20alex]

That's brilliant! You've really given it a sense of scale, the planet looks massive. I like the extra planets and the starry background (did you use Photoshop?). I also think the water looks really good, what sort of shader did you use for the planet surface?

[darthvader]

The background is actually all terragen 2,except for the lense flares which were added in photoshop. The clip file is from moodflow and here's the link.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4391.0

As for the planet's surface, it is just a couple layered color power fractals with distribution shaders controlling the amount of distribution. I'm trying to make a clip file for it but whenever i load it back into tg2 I get about 6 million error messages.