Star System Test

[someguy]

Only one kibits...

The shadows on the planets are not facing away from the sun.

[tilt]

good spot someguy - yes the shadows should reflect where the planet is in comparison to the sun. And one more thing I believe would add to the overall look. The stars in the background are to uniform, make some dark spaces in between... it is after all.. space

[Diamond]

@someguy: Yep. This is just a test really to see how things might look. I knew about the shadows, I just didn't bother flipping the planets around to show correct placement. :p

@plamadude: I might take you up on your offer, but if I cry uncle, don't be surprised...

@Daelin: It was pretty easy to make:
3 layers:

1st (bottom layer) - make a circle, fill with black, then contract and delete the inside depending on how thick (roughly) you want your Belt to be.
2nd (middle layer) - Filter-->Clouds-->Difference Clouds (10 or so times), I used a slate blue and a very light gray. Ctrl-click on your 1st layer, inverse, feather to preference, delete.
3rd (top layer) - just brushes and layer styles. I used one of the standard CS stipple brushes, sized it up to around 40 or 50 pixels, and just layed down some 'asteroids' roughly following the ring from layer 1. I used two colors, a gray and a brown. Then I did Layer Style-->Bevel&Emboss and played around until I found a setting I liked, then Pattern Overlay, just something simple to give it a bit of texture, faded down to 20 or 25% opacity.

I went back then and deleted the darker blues out of my 2nd(clouds) layer, to give the appearance of ragged spots and holes. Then I deleted the 1st layer with the black ring in it. And that was pretty much it. It's really simple to do and looks pretty good, it just took several hours of trial and error to stumble on a style that I thought looked nice...

@tilt: Not sure what you mean by the colors looking too uniform. Do you mean from planet to planet? If that's the case, don't worry, I plan to change things up on color schemes when I get going on the actual map.

[tilt]

no, if you take the purple planet - its the same shade all over - I would like to see some lines/spots/specks/dots/stribes... ... look at jupitor and saturn for inspiration

[Diamond]

no, if you take the purple planet - its the same shade all over - I would like to see some lines/spots/specks/dots/stribes... ... look at jupitor and saturn for inspiration

Oh, okay, gotcha. Although it's just as likely that there's gas giants out there with nice, clean, uniform color striations too...

[plamadude30k]

Oh, okay, gotcha. Although it's just as likely that there's gas giants out there with nice, clean, uniform color striations too...

Actually, there are. Class III Gas Giants are basically featureless. All of the cool looking stuff on Jupiter and Saturn are Ammonia clouds in the upper atmosphere. Planets like Uranus don't really have many clouds in their 'atmospheres,' so they look featureless. Not purple, though, usually blue. However, you can have a large purple-ish object if you up the mass quite a bit to a T-type brown dwarf. Actually, they're magenta, but the color is close to what you have. It's probably just 20-50 times as massive as Jupiter.

Look here for gas giant types.

[tilt]

sure, by they don't look as cool

[Diamond]

Yeah, I'll be going more for pretty than for scientifically accurate.

[rdanhenry]

There's a complex molecule in the atmosphere, in a small amount, but enough to change the color from the standard hue. Anyone who won't accept that justification should stay away from science fiction in the first place.

[alizarine]

heh. That's an excellent explanation - we only know the science we've been exposed to (bad way to put it, but I'm not a scientist ^.^ ) Anyways, if you're going to be mapping any of these planets individually, like continents and stuff, and you have photoshop, you can use the 3d sphere mapping to get 3d spheres ( o.O ) with the world-map projected on it. That could take a bit (a lot) of work, but it would look really nice. Obviously gas-giant planets probably wouldn't have a world-map, but you're planets so far would do a great job as gas-giants (with a bit of tweaking, as you mentioned you'll be doing). Dunno if you want to go into that much detail, mapping each planet then creating a 3d sphere projection, but it's an option ^__^ If this is just a test run, I'm really looking forward to the final. Good luck!

- Alizarine