Planets

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 2:28 pm

I had a few minutes before I went to work this morning and made a quick planet. Needs an atmosphere or something... but please excuse it as I only spent about 5 minutes or less on it. It's been reduced to fit this page, too.

Lets use this thread to talk about planets and nebula packs, instead of the 'hig res star wars; bug found' thread.

Ramaglor · Post by **Ramaglor** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 10:17 pm

"Will TG2 be able to render fractal planets and landscapes without any heightfield terrains at all?

Yes. Procedural terrains can be freely mixed with traditional heightfields. Entire planets can be created using procedural terrains and/or heightfields."

Terragen V.2.0 is soon to be released, and it can render images of entire planets that look very much like planets, including atmosphere, clouds and light and shadow effects. The demo can render up to 800x600 pixels.

Terragen

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 6:24 am

Terragen looks pretty cool. The above pic was made in Bryce5. Originally it was 3D so i could look at it from any angle, move the sun's position, lotsa cool stuff.

Adaven · Post by **Adaven** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 7:14 pm

Orion found a nice tutorial somewhere to do planets in 2D.

And yes, TG is very nifty.

Quia · Post by **Quia** » Wed Jan 24, 2007 5:02 am

I've been working at getting high resolution images for the planets, I've done a bit of space art in the past, looked at a lot of it, and real images tend to look a whole lot more impressive to me.
Found a couple of awesome resources:
http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/dataserv/index.htm
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/archive/
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/
The first two are more scientific resources than 'eyecandy' but there are some great images hidden away in there that we can use..

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:57 pm

Since we're on the subject of 'planets' I'd like to share a couple with you. These are not meant to be used in Allegiance. These are pictures that I took. I took them through a 5" telescope. Sorry about having links to them, they are BMP files and not the correct format to post here. They need to be JPG format to post 'em, and saving my images in that format degrades the quality big time. Hell, when i save them as a jpg, they're not perfectly round anymore... O_o

Jupiter with 2 moons:

This one is Saturn. I was truely amazed after i got done stacking about 800 pictures to see 4 moons around it. I checked my plantarium software and sure enough, they are moons to saturn.

Here it is zoomed a bit.

Post by **pkk** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 4:16 pm

Note:
Mspaint (XP) supports PNG and JPG... /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_(software)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 6:26 pm

yes, but this forum will only allow jpg extensions to be posted. At least it wasn't allowing anything but jpg when i posted that.

EDIT: Bah, i never tried PNG though, Thanks! (still kinda messes with the shape and clarity)

Original BMP's:
http://www.mesialonline.com/SRM/J2label.bmp

http://www.mesialonline.com/SRM/saturn2a.bmp

http://www.mesialonline.com/SRM/Sat2aClose.bmp

Dogbones · Post by **Dogbones** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 5:26 am

Nice pics Mesial, but definitely crop (don't zoom) those bmp's as they are not compressed all that black takes up a lot of space.

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 1:42 pm

Thanks Dog. I havn't taken the telescope out in about a year, just havn't had the time. I did manage to take it out last year and snap off a few pictures of Mars.