So, here's version 2. I've redone all of the planets completely, making sure of a few things this time around. Planets with water (Coelenth, for example) now actually, you know, HAVE water. Bangarash has a little more water, which is appropriate for the planet. I made the water less of a flat colour by adding another layer below the land for the water to rest on, selecting the continents on the land layer, and then growing the selection a little, adding a lighter colour for the water there, and Gaussian Blurring them into a nice gradient. Not that you can really make out the detail on the smaller planets of the map, but the large planet images look better for it.

I've added the ring I wanted around Coelenth, though I'm not sure I'm happy with it. It's supposed to be a ring of dust and ice vertical and a little askew, but it looks pretty bad in this version. I'll be redoing it for the next.

I moved Azureus. I really wanted Azureus to have a nice, central location on the image, it being the home planet of most of the races, but in the end I just needed to fill in some more space off in that corner, which looked really bare in the last version.

Another thing I want for next version which will, unfortunately, require I add all of the planets and moons again, is to add in the shadows that I made for them. This time I added planets and moons from the .png files that I had made of them, forgetting that I cropped them from 500x500 each to a range of sizes, depending on the intensity of the atmosphere. I also want to establish a good scale of sizes, which can be based off of every celestial body starting at a 500x500 size and making them smaller from there. This time I really just eyeballed the sizes, but Kukri is still a bit bigger than it should be, and Bangarash is too big compared to Niff. Most of the other planets mesh well enough with the others, but I want to redo sizes all the same.

Finally, moons. Emaria has a smaller number of moons-per-planet than we do, which explains why the gas giant only has three (instead of sixty five or whatever absurd amount Saturn has) and terrestrial planets have, at most, two. Fuu'u'll, a white dwarf system which I will be working on after Sirius, will probably be leaner for moons-per-planet, but it'll also have a total of nine planets (the most in the Emarion universe, if I'm not mistaken). Another quick note about the moons: Niff's moons were not generated like the others. I scoured free texture resource sites for a decent picture of cratered ground, and cut out bits of it to form Haim and Evaun. I also desaturated Haim, but left Evaun alone. They unfortunately don't look terribly cratered in the image, but the .png files look okay. Similarly, Ansekh was made by adding a bumpmap to a picture of a satin sheet that had been wrinkled a bunch, coloured gold instead of wine red.

Hmm. I'll try not to prattle on too much for the next update.