Help Needed: Drawing Planets

[st3f]

Hi everyone.

For a pet project I'm going to be drawing some planets. A quick test tells me that I have some idea of how to do the light and shade and how to do an atmospheric glow. What I'm drawing a complete blank on is how to stretch a flat texture so that it looks like it's mapped onto a sphere. I've tried using bump (image below), but the stretch is wrong. Bump stetches heavily at the centre and little at the edges. I feel like I need something that will leave the centre more or less alone, but heavily compress the edges.

Does anyone have any ideas? Or a completely different approach that I've not thought of?

Here's hoping someone can help.

- Stef.

[Sebastiaan]

I tried this with a lot of trial and error once by using the bump effect and perspective transform together. First use perspective transform where you put the handles inwards towards the centre. You will probably be able to do the same by just making the texture smaller, but I felt I had a bit more control over the texture with perspective transform. You will also shrink the texture by that. Then apply a bump to the middle of the texture, or where you find it more suitable. You'll notice that you already get a sort of 3D sphere effect in the texture. Then add a circular mask to the texture.

Here is the texture without the mask and the effects applied.



Here is the masked texture.

[st3f]

Hi Sebastiaan.

Thanks for the reply. That really is a good texture. It already looks like a planet before the distortion.

Your method seems to have the same problem as mine, though. Although the centre of the planet looks good, the edges don't have have the linear compresson that I'm looking for.

I'll put this idea on the back burner and see if my brain comes up with any answers when I'm not actively trying to solve it.

Thanks again.

- Stef.

[st3f]

OK... so I cheated. I used a free app called Tiny Planets to generate a texture with polar co-ordinates and imported the round looking texture into Pixelmator Pro where it had a mask, a highlight, a shadow and an atmospheric glow waiting for it. Now, if I could only remember why I was doing this...