Celestia Planet

[icosahedron]

Does anyone have an Earthlike planet that they could drop in here?

Celestia and similar software seems to produce photorealistic planets, and I need a pic of a planet in space, without getting hammered for copyright.

Clouds are good, provided they don't obscure the Area of Interest - the border between the northern ice cap and some greener land.

It would be good if you could include some zooms of the Area of Interest, going as far as possible without obvious pixellation (I don't know if Celestia zooms onto planets).

I want to use it (them) as a base to inset my own map into, using Viewingdale.

I'm not planning to profit from it, but I'd like to display my derivative here and elsewhere.

Thanks.

[Gidde]

Celestia does zoom in; the amount of zoom is dependent upon how large the resolution is of your map.

I've been itching to play with celestia a bit anyway; I could probably help you out if you can wait a couple weekends. Did you have a planet already in progress? Celestia textures are basically 3 maps -- an equirectangular map (think Ascension's atlas tut and much much darker than is intuitive), a bump map that corresponds, and a cloud layer. So if you have an equirectangular (or any projection I can flexify into it) sketch, I can go from there.

[selden]

Your software info mentions that you have Fractal Terrains. You can use it to generate a full-planet map. If you export that map's variants as png images, they can be used with Celestia.

Celestia is just a viewing program which has been optimized for astronomical uses. It wraps "Cylindrical Equidistant" (Plate Carré) maps around spheres (in orbit around stars , etc) which you can then examine. It can display maps as large as your computer can handle.

Unfortunately, the VirtualTextures that it uses for extremely high resolution surface maps are somewhat awkward to generate.

A web page which discusses Celestia's use of texture maps is at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/textures.html

[icosahedron]

Thanks guys.

I don't have a map of a world-in-progress, this is something of a one-off and I didn't want to put anyone to any trouble.

Any old blue and green planet you've already made would do, if it has an ice cap.

I'm just experimenting with a map-nesting technique and I need a globe to nest another map into. I could use a public domain Earth-in-space shot, except Earth's a bit cheesy and I'd have no zoomed in shots.

The zoomed in shots are just to help prevent the globe pixellating as I zoom in to my tiny map area. (if that makes sense).

I have Fractal Terrains in my sig but it's years since I used it, it's an old version and it isn't currently loaded on my computer. When I get around to some serious planet building, I'll see what else is on the market and decide where to go from there.

[Gidde]

Ok then, I'll generate one up with planetgen. It makes some decent globe shots if you don't let it place mountains for you

[Ascension]

There are some planets in my planet tutorial, have fun with them if you want.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3388

[Zeta Kai]

Check out this world & see if it's what you're looking for; made by me in Photoshop:

Muhka Rarha.jpg

[icosahedron]

Thanks guys.

Zeta, I've used your icy planet. my WIP is here:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=7225

However, detailed though it is, you can see the limitations on the WIP thread. I don't know if Gidde's planet could solve that problem?

If not, maybe this is the best I can get until I start to produce my own planets. (thanks for the tut, Ascension).

[Gidde]

Hmm, a planetgen planet probably wouldn't have a whole lot more detail. I'll look over at the celestia resources page and see if they have a non-copyrighted planet with high res.

[selden]

Don't forget that If you want a single high resolution image of the entire planet's surface, that implies a gigantic file. For example, 8192x4096 map would have a resolution of only about 5km per pixel at the equator and be about 128MB uncompressed. Improving the resolution by a factor of 2 increases the file size by a factor of 4.

A fractal planet generator will take quite a while to generate a really large planetary map.