So I've been trying to teach myself how to use GIMP and I thought a good way to start would be to make some planets. Full disclosure: I'm not a talented artist by any means. I found a great tutorial on how to do this here: http://mygimptutorial.com/the-ultimate-gimp-planet-tutorial . But I thought I'd share the results of my labours with anyone here who might want to use them. I have two planets done so far and i'll add more if people are interested as I get them finished.

An arid world:

Edit to this post: As of 03/2019 the above tutorial is no longer available and the link is broken. However... there are others out there for anyone who is interested in making planets.

An ecumenopolis with clouds:

An ecumenopolis with no cloud cover:

A water planet

and the same planet with different clouds

The same planet with an Imperial blockade or interdiction force:

A smoggy planet with an atmosphere possibly polluted by industrial waste, or maybe its a cold cold place with a methane atmosphere:

Very nice images. Another way to do planets is with something like: http://www.ignishot.com/grand-designer.html which can be bought via Steam

Thats pretty cool. I'll have to try that out.

Red Giant Star:

i did this one as a representation of the star R Leporis. But theres no reason it couldn't exist somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

9 hours ago, Kallabecca said:

Very nice images. Another way to do planets is with something like: http://www.ignishot.com/grand-designer.html which can be bought via Steam

Oh holy frak! This could come in QUITE handy for the planet profiles I work on. Thank you!

On 2017-5-27 at 5:25 PM, Kallabecca said:

Very nice images. Another way to do planets is with something like: http://www.ignishot.com/grand-designer.html which can be bought via Steam

This is really nice, but man is it expensive for what it is.

I guess as a tool for professionals the pricetag makes sense, just hard to justify it as a fun little tool for GMing.

41 minutes ago, Tom Cruise said:

This is really nice, but man is it expensive for what it is.

I guess as a tool for professionals the pricetag makes sense, just hard to justify it as a fun little tool for GMing.

$50 is expensive? That's one or two books for this RPG or less than the cost of some of the ships for X-wing or Armada, heheh. It allows for the export of the models and the maps to be used elsewhere, for doing more stuff with the assets, like creating animations or for use in game engines like Unity or UnrealEngine

This can also be done in more complicated programs, like Substance Painter ($150), Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, Maya, etc..., but then you'd have to go through the process of setting up a model and the nodes for painting the surface with the various parameters for creating terrain and clouds, heheh.

When I wrote that post I'd only taken a quick look; assumed it was for generating 2D images, which was kinda dumb of me in hindsight. Looks like a pretty powerful tool.

On 5/27/2017 at 1:25 AM, Kallabecca said:

Very nice images. Another way to do planets is with something like: http://www.ignishot.com/grand-designer.html which can be bought via Steam

This looks like an amazing resource! Adding to my Steam wish-list to watch for a future sale.

If you work in the programs DAZ Studio 4 or Poser, there are a few freebie planet /sky dome sets you can use. one of them is this one , which includes textures for turning the sky sphere into a planet. You could even make your own textures in programs like GIMP,or Photoshop, and apply them in order to create your own planets. There's also this one . Tire's also this one for actual Star Wars planets .

15 hours ago, Tramp Graphics said:

You could even make your own textures in programs like GIMP, or Photoshop, and apply them in order to create your own planets.

Yea, thats one thing I've been doing is trying to render my own textures which I can then use for surface depth or different kinds of cloud cover. I think its pretty cool how messing around with brightness and contrast can make things happen that you weren't even expecting.

5 hours ago, GM Spectre said:

Yea, thats one thing I've been doing is trying to render my own textures which I can then use for surface depth or different kinds of cloud cover. I think its pretty cool how messing around with brightness and contrast can make things happen that you weren't even expecting.

Making textures isn't that hard, depending upon the model's UV map. The more complex the map, the more difficult. The other major factor is what kind of bump and displacement maps you might need as well.