While playing around in wikipedia, I found these photorealistic images of terraformed mars, venus, and the moon. They all list the same guy in the credits. I can find plenty of other sites using the same pics, but so far I haven’t tracked down his site, or any other which gives me a hint as to how they were created.
How might he have created them?
Possibly terragen.
Looks like he created the textures by hand and then probably put them into a 3D program.
The textures aren’t especially detailed, so they look a bit slapdash. He’s got a weird haloing effect around some of the coastlines, I’m not sure what that’s about.
The Venus one looks like he took Europe and buggered around with it a bit to get what he wanted, and Mars looks like he did the same with Africa.
It’s not that hard to do once you know how. I had to make a planet earth for someone recently.
He might be using actual elevation maps of the bodies’ surfaces, rather than fabricating his own landmasses. (All those craters on the Mars image make me think he might be using the real thing.) You can find gridded elevation data for the terrestrial planets on NASA websites.
Also, the freeware program Celestia has some elevation maps built-in. Some enthusiastic Celestia users have gone and found high-res versions of these, and made them available too.
As to the specific software tools he’s using — I have no idea.
. . . In fact, that strange long lake, or bay, in his Mars image looks like it’s the Valles Marineris canyons — which you can also see on the false-color relief map here. (Scroll about two-thirds of the way down.)
Another view of the canyons is here, in the banner image at the top of the page.
Why don’t you ask him? http://daein.blogsplot.net/
Judging by his annoying webpage design, I can think of many reasons why not to ask him.
For the Moon and Mars I used Photoshop only. The Venus image is older and I used a more primitive technique that used Celestia as well. As for the ghosting on the shores if you notice when you look at shallow seas on Earth from space the water is lighter than normal ocean. I used Elevation maps plus addition of some albedo maps as well as full color maps all combined If you look at the actual maps themselves they contain a lot of detail. Mars map Warning it’s huge.
Here is the link to most of the rest of the art. It’s mostly the older technique done for people who had specific requests. I haven’t done any in awhile (almost a year) because the computer I used had it’s bus chip burn out and my job hasn’t giving me the free time to build a new computer and work on this stuff. :mad: Anyway if you have any questions about specific techniques you can write me at any email address @daein.org.
