Gliese 581-G (Just for fun)
Edit: I suppose I should have posted this in "Finished Maps" but I don't know if I want to leave the coastline looking like this.
Masking so many regions and doing canon research for my Pern project was very time consuming, so I decided to go ahead and finish a quick map for another project for the sake of testing my proposed work-flow. I'm not displeased, though I do welcome pointers on how I might have executed this better from a design/scientific angle. I'm probably going to take another crack at this type of planet in the future when I learn more.
Has anyone else seen a rendering of Gliese 581-G aside from the one or three images you can find on Google? Would be neat to see more art of these "eyeball" worlds.
In case some people are wondering what this is, Gliese 581-G is a theorized type of planet, earthlike in size, orbiting a red-dwarf star in the "goldilocks zone" (close enough to have liquid water.) The problem is that when a satellite orbits the cooler stars close enough to have liquid water, they become fixed in orbit, always facing one direction.
Revolutions around the sun at this short distance would only take a little over 30 days! That's one short year... Anyway, this always facing one direction is the reason for some interesting geography. Scientists originally speculated that they must look like eyeballs. Not much going on tidally or anything, but if there were currents, and warm weather fronts, we'd (apparently) have an un-frozen area that looked like a lobster not an eye, lol. But I thought an eye-world was cooler.
EyeballEarthGlieseFullMapForGlobe.jpg
EyeBallearthGliese-ByPodcreaturecrop.jpg
Original PS base, made by pasting Earth, Mars and other space DEM data together.
GrayScaleOculaWilbur.png
A bit of Wilbur editing.
I colored it in photoshop by using adjustment layers and gradient maps of various combinations. I also used Curves to select certain low and high areas from my base heightmap. I think the normal map I did needs to be inverted. Not sure.
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