Planet WIP - C&C Welcome
Hi everybody!
I have been recently working on adapting Ascensions fantastic Planet Making tutorials to either Gimp, Photoshop Elements 2, or both. Along the way, I started to develop some techniques and shortcuts of my own. Here is a planet I have been working at for the better part of the day. I am particularly interested in the city lights on the dark slice of the planet. Any critiques or suggestions about that (or anything else) is welcome.
Thanks,
James
Looks interesting so far, really. Good continental shapes, I think, nice water.
Maybe not enough clouds yet and probably the same problem as my planetary map: too green. I'm working on my own planetary map (see this forum) and need to bring in more diversity.
The city lights look very neat, but somehow you need to place cities on the bright side too, because currently it looks like there are none. Maybe try and place little grey splashes?
Anyways, looks neat-o!
Thanks for the response and compliments.
The green thing I can fix in future (or even go back and redo this one) maps with a change of the gradient I use to color the land layer. I noted that there was too much green myself and possibly too bright. I can easily turn down the brightness by switching off the duplicate layer.
I can probably add a couple of more cloud layers to make more clouds and the clouds "pop" a little more.
The bright side cities are going to be a little more tough. I haven't had a great deal of luck finding good reference shots of the eastern sea board to get an idea of what it looks like from orbit. The gray splashes may be an idea that I can run with.
Back to looking for orbital pictures.
And then the obvious strikes me; Google ..... Earth. Duh!
Looking at the Eastern USA coastline, you really can't see any specific cities until you zoom in real close. From orbit, it is all sort of a mishmash of brown and gray. Interesting and educational to look at.
One thing that I really want to avoid is getting caught up in hyper-realism. Google maps is technically very accurate, but dang the continents look boring. This and other maps I have been/will be working on are actually going to be used in a little project I am working on. I want them to be pretty as much as functional. Pretty actually is going to take the lead, as most cities are going to be designated with a little pointer indicating the name of the city.
I do need to decrease the greens a bit. That would probably help out a lot. I'll post an update soon.
An updated WIP.
Looks better. Even though I'd say now it's a little too little green *grin*
A tad bit more, for woodlands or such... anyways, I like it and your provided info is helpful. If you can't see cities from orbit, well you can't see them from orbit obviously
Thanks!
I think the lights are much more 'convincing' now. This is coming along nicely.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Thanks. Almost done with the last of the scenery/geographic updates. Then I'm going to try to put in some political boundaries and some labels. I just don't know how much the shadow is going to interfere. We'll see.Originally Posted by Steel General
Another WIP. I really started not to like the shadow, so I deleted it and started over with a shadow that encompasses half of the planet. I wanted to have some continental definition so I had to reduce the opacity of the shadow a bit. To fix this, I created two more shadow layers at 33% and 25% of the planet. I set the opacity of the layers as a sort of primitive gradient and merged them together to get the gradual deepening of the shadow as you get further into the night side.
My initial toying with borders has not been entirely successful. More on that later. I may have to copy a flat map from an earlier version and apply a lens after I have them drawn out. Possible same with the labels.
The newest one looks really really good.
Enough green to satisfy me personally, although I'd maybe implement some forests. The cities look brilliant, would you mind telling me the hex-data for the color used? I'd like to try that one for my planetary map, too, if it's okay with you.
Also, you might want to add some rivers maybe? Rivers and woodlands would make this planet a lot more diverse and awesome, I'd say.
Also a last point of criticism: Put a very few lights inside the continent, or at least a little deeper into it from the sea. The land may not be settled much, but - without further knowledge - I'd say there would be several locations on the "inside", too.
Hope this helps in getting this supreme work a tiny bit better! ;D
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