Planet backgrounds

[smbarbour]

The rock in the center is nearly a perfect rectangle! If you intended for it to have a "carved out of a rock" look, add more rough stuff... maybe replace it with a large, irregular protrusion and hew a flat surface into the side. Right now it looks like a perfect natural landing platform just happened to surface out of the lava for you.

As for the background... if you can't get terragen to do anything but variations on the default "blue sky and clouds", maybe try rendering it without a sky and adding a simple horizon gradient in the GIMP, and maybe layer it with some soot.

Although you know what this picture REALLY needs.... a volcano!

Something to consider... maybe you could export your landscape and use a 3D suite like blender to render it, since you'd have more control over light sources, haze, and stuff.

The first one I did had a flat enough for a ship to land but still natural. The second was intentionally flattened (since apparently robots live on lava planets ) BTW I used MSPaint to create the flat surface . My computer at work does not have enough power to run Blender or Wings, and my machine at home does not have internet access . I did change the sky though. It has a purplish hue to it but is mostly red. Unfortunately, Terragen doesn't do volcanoes . But yes, it certainly does.

The intention for the flat surface was so that someone could add appropriate structures.

[Halleck]

I understand, but decide if you want to have a totally natural protrusion, a totally manmade protrusion, or a manmade protrustion hewn into a natural protrusion. The current iteration looks like a natural protrusion perfectly engineered by humans.

As for volcanoes, it would be possible to model a volcano in terragen and add glow effects/particles in another program. If you wanted to do it yourself, i guess you could burn blender onto a cd and bring it home or something.

[oneru]

"que infomercial"
If terragen is giving you headaches try this freeware alternative.
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"end Infomercial"

Seriously I have looked at terragen, and it does have one or two cool functions, But it is really limited when compared to a really good program like Pov-ray.

[XV-745]

I really liked the first image the best.

http://www.inficad.com/~shadowstar/VegaS/volcanic.jpg

As a geologist, these two bug me:

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... d-Art/lava

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... -Art/lava2

Volcanic planets should have lava, but the lava should be no where near the landing pad. Lava is extremely HOT and CORROSIVE to the rock around it. Those protruding rocks in the latter two examples would be subject to extreme winds and temperatures and may not even be stable, judging from the amount of lava around them.

Hollywood always screws this up (e.g. Star Wars Ep III). Directors see images from Hawaii, where a few people are standing "near" a river of lava. But, those shots are usually a) taken with a telephoto lens, which distorts your perspective and makes the people look like they're closer to the lava than they actually are and b) taken near cool, isolated lava flows.

There's a big difference, thermally speaking, between having a single lava flow to one side of you and being completely surrounded by lava.

I could be underestimating the scale. But, ships are usually several hundred pixels wide at planet landings. If you shrink the ships down to just a few dozens of pixels across, you might be able to call the third example above a passable landing site.

(and, the first image, for that matter, doesn't have a passable landing site, per se. But, a structure added to the foreground would serve)

Regardless, I think the lava should only be present either at a great distance or on only one side of the image.


My $0.02.

XV

[smbarbour]

I'll agree with you there. Technically, we shouldn't be landing on this type of planet. We should be landing at some orbital structure. Volcanic planets are way too unstable to place any kind of base on. But until we have something more believeable, I placed my suggestions for review.