Photo-Realistic Planet part ii

The shadows on planets are slightly fuzzy because their surfaces are bumpy and the atmosphere deflects light. This picture is an actual photo of Earth. You may notice that the fuzziness of the shadow's edge changes as you go from the poles to the equator. This effect is caused by the change in perspective as the surface changes its angle towards us as it gets near the poles. To make our planet look uber realistic, we have to simulate this effect.

So now we have to give our planet a shadow.

Create a new layer. Use the Vector Mask to make a circular selection and fill it with black.

Drop the opacity down to about 75%

Now we have to squeeze it using the Free Transform tool. (Edit>Free Transform)

Hold Alt down and grab on of the vertical sides of the Transform Box and pull it toward the center. By pressing Alt, both sides of the circle should move toward the center point equally.

Hit Enter to apply the transformation.

Next, apply a Gaussian blur to make the edge of the shadow somewhat fuzzy. Around 5pt should be big enough, we don't want it too fuzzy.

Now, use the Free Transform tool again to pull the circle back almost to its original shape. Remember to hold Alt.

Leave a crescent of the planet underneath visible. The bigger the crescent the more of your planet will be lit.

Now use a large black brush to cover up one of the crescents.

Don't worry about overlapping into space as the shadow is black and space is black. If you have a backdrop like stars or nebulae, you can delete the overlapping blackness by using the Vector Mask again. See I said you would be using that vector mask a lot. :)

 

How To Make A Photo-Realistic Planet

This tutorial will show you how to make a photo-realistic planet in Photoshop. This is for slightly more advanced photoshop users so i won't go into deep detail about how to use the tools.

First off comes, maybe not the most exciting part, but one of the most important parts, we need to create a new image, and fill it with black, as presumably our planet is in outer space. Mine is 3000X3000 as i like to work big, but you can do smaller if you want.

Next use the Oval Shape tool to draw a black circle in the center that fills roughly 75% of the image. Its hard to see here but the most import ant part of this step is that the shape too creates a nice perfect circle vector mask for us to use through out the process.

The Vector mask will be shown attached to the new layer by a little shackle link icon. (kinky)

Now to start we need to add a surface to the planet. You can get creative here. I like to use close up photos of rocks or satellite images of terrain. This is a nice close up pic of a rock i found on a free texture web sight.

Make sure your image is big enough to cover your planet. If you enlarge images they get fuzzy and won't look right.

Now this is the time we get to use our circle vector mask

Select the Layer with the black circle on it.

Flip over to the Paths tab.

Make sure that the Vector Mask is selected. Click on the little dotted circle icon at the bottom of the window. This will create a selection based on the Vector Mask. Pretty (I thought so).

Now, inverse the selection (Select>Inverse) so that every thing outside of the planet is selected. select the Rocky layer and press delete. Our planet should be a circle now.

Remember this technique as we will be using it a LOT.

The problem is our planet looks like it did back in the bronze age, a flat disk.

To fix this we need to apply the Spherize Filter.

Use the Vector Mask to select the planet again.

Go to Filters>Distort>Spherize

Set it to 100% and apply.

Now our planet is looking more planet like.

Next we need an atmosphere for our citizens to breath. (if they breath) This may take some experimenting to get it looking right for you.

For the lower Atmosphere, create a new Layer and do the Vector Select thing again.

Now go to Edit>Stroke.

Set the Width to something greater than 10 pixels.

Now pic a nice atmospheric color. Our planet has a blue atmosphere because it is made mostly of Nitrogen, but you could make it what ever color you want, but it is best to stay away from dark colors.

Make sure the stroke is set to Inside and then apply.

You can also play with the color of the surface texture as well to get a nice color scheme.

Next we need to make our atmosphere fuzzy.

With the planet still selected, apply a Gaussian Blur Filter (Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur)

Setting it somewhere between 30 and 75 gives the best results depending on the size of your planet.

If the layer is almost invisible, duplicate the layer a few times and merge them to make it more opaque.

It should end up looking somewhat like this,

Now we also have to make the upper atmosphere, the one with the ozone thing.

Create a new layer. The upper atmosphere is created the exact same way as the lower except for a few changes.

When stroking the upper atmosphere, use a smaller stoke, about half the size of the lower atmo.

The color of the upper atmosphere should be of a similar hue as the lower one but it should be much lighter.

Lastly, the Gaussian Blur should not be as big. only about 1/3 or less of the lower one's.

Yay! now our planet has an atmosphere.

Ok that's it for now. Next we will learn how to make a sweet looking shadow. Stay tuned. :)

texturing tutorial part 5

Ok! Now comes my favorite part; adding dust, grime and scratches to make the hatch look old. I find that for dust, pictures of clouds work great

I like to take my own pictures of clouds, but this particular one is from the internet. The best kind are white with a solid blue background. Invert the picture (Image>Adjustments>Invert) and add a little contrast to it. Now, with the Eyedropper (tool pallet) suck up some of the peachy orange around the cloud. Using the Replace Color function (Image>Adjustments>Replace Color) raise the orange color’s brightness to the point it becomes white. Also, increase the Fuzziness to remove most of the orange from the picture.

Copy the entire cloud image and past into the texture. Move it to a place you think needs some grime. Set the Layer property to Multiply.

Since grime likes to hide in cracks and corners, there would be more dirt in the recessed parts of the white paneling. With the Magic Wand, select the area around the black bars. Delete that area from the cloud layer and reduce the layer’s opacity to about 30%.

Continue adding dust to the whole texture until the door looks suitably grungy. Remember not to overdo it. Galactica has been around for 40 years but it also wasn’t crewed by mud ementals.

Now it is time to do the little surface chips and scrapes caused by wear and tear. Using the Polygon Lasso Tool(tool pallet), select a little jagged area on a convex edge that has a high possibility of being scraped. Use the paint bucket to fill it with white and drop the opacity down to about 25%.

Continue adding chips to the door.

Use a fine sharp brush to add some scratches here and there along the edges.

Our Hatch is almost finished!! One last detail is needed. The Mag Lock sticker. I copied it off of this picture I found on the internet.

Use the square selection tool to select the sticker. Copy and paste it into the texture. Transform the layer to make it smaller and to scale (Edit>Free Transform) Use brightness and contrast to get the metal part of the layer black and the white part solid white. Set the layer property to screen.

Congratulations you have now textured a Galactica Hatch!

The techniques described in this tutorial can be used to texture most metallic technical things. Remember to think creatively when using Photoshop, as there are always many ways to do something and you have to experiment to find out which way suites you best. If you ever get stuck, look at other texture artists’ work to get ideas.
Good luck and always remember to have fun.

Texturing Tutorial

Texturing a Hatch Tutorial

Part 4

Welcome back!

Now it’s time to do the rest of the door. To help make sure I get the correct scale of the white paneling, I copied a piece of a photograph and pasted onto the UV map.

Create a new Layer. Use the Polygon Lasso tool to select the white areas and use the Paint Bucket to fill the areas with white. If you hold down shift while using the Lasso tool you can add to a current selection. Holding down alt will let you subtract from a selection.

Set the white layer to about 80% opacity. Use Stroke and/or a thin black brush at about 3pt to add a black boarder to the white.
To make a straight line with the brush tool, hold down shift, click where you want the line to start and still holding shift click where you want it to end.
Also, using the previous shading technique, add some white Highlights around the frame.

Create a new Layer. Using the Square Selection tool, make black vertical bars. Then with the Magic Wand Selection Tool, select the area outside the white part and delete the extruding black bars. Set them to about 15% opacity.

Create a new Layer. Using the Magic Wand Selection Tool , select the black bars and on a new Layer add some shading with a soft black brush. Reduce the Layer opacity to about 20%. Select the white layer and do similarly. Make sure to create a new layer.

To make the white paneling just snap into place we need to give a wee bit more depth. Select the black bars with the Magic Wand. Create a new layer. Make a 1pt black stroke on the inside of the selection. Add a 2.5pt Gaussian Blur to the Layer. Deselect and it should look like this.

Select the center metal strut with the square selection tool. Using a soft black brush, about 45 pt, shade the edges so it looks like it is a cylinder. Leave it fairly dark.

Our door is almost done being textured but we have a few things left to tackle. We still need to do the edge of the door.

Because I get a little lazy sometimes, I just stole the texture for the edge off of a previous texture I did. There is no shame in taking shortcuts as long as they work and don't detract from the quality of the texture.

I also lowered the brightness and contrast of the metal to make it fit more with the photograph.

Well our door is "technically" finished, but to make it look real we need to add a few more things. Stay Tuned! :)