The Solar System: September, AD 15605

[altasilvapuer]

To me, it looks like a good base for creating landforms on a Mars-like planet. Some tweaking here and there, and crazy layer styles and/or blend modes, and I think it could work well. I see a huge shield volcano-type thing, personally.

Nice find!

-asp

[töff]

Somehow, my "orbital tracks" ended up with unequal spacing between :\ so I'm redoing them. That's OK because I want to work the pancake texture into that part.

Funny how much of a project you can spend lots of time on, only to throw it out.

Also, I gave up the rotated canvas. I'll just work straight to the page, now. it worked for Ceres but it was becoming too much of a hassle to do the borders at an angle. But STARTING from an angle gave me the necessary crop area, so it wasn't a wasted effort.

[töff]

LOL. Suddenly I remembered that I need the sun in the (offset) middle of this thing.

So I grabbed some images of the sun & composited them and ran out some glow streaks.

I tried to give the middle of it some luminance. Luminance is tough in printing. All you can do, really, is reveal the white paper underneath. Any imagery or ink you add just reduces that whiteness. It amounts to "add darkness everywhere else."

Too bad I don't have luminous ink.

[töff]

Somehow, my "orbital tracks" ended up with unequal spacing between

Oh, I see how that happened. Doh. I spaced them equally on-center, but they have various widths. Crap ... even my redo is wrong. LOL.

[altasilvapuer]

That is one amazing sun, Töff!

You should consider a brief tutorial on how you created some of these celestial bodies, sometime.

Repped!
-asp

[töff]

Thanks.

Didn't I include how I made the planets, earlier?

Basically I jsut got surface textures (most of them easily found thru Google) and wrapped them around spheres in a 3D app (in my case, 3DS max 2010). I gave the spheres some specularity to make them look more kinda like painted wooden balls.

Pretty soon I need to start dropping them into the map and rotating them into position.

But I gotta get the stinkin' orbital tracks regimanted first. Sheesh. Devil's in the details, ya know?

[altasilvapuer]

D'oh! You did already cover it; I had completely forgotten.

Can't wait to see the planets in their tracks.

-asp

[töff]

That is one amazing sun ... a brief tutorial

For the sun, I just layed 2 or 3 different pictures of the sun over each other, fiddled with the modes (like Screen or HardLight), and masked them up.

For the rays, I made a layer, added a boatload of noise, did a radial zoom blur, then masked its edges ... then used it as a mask for a pure red layer.

For the middle glow, I just bumped the levels way up (and masked the levels adjustment layer).

Here's the PSCS4 file if anybody wants to dig into it and see: http://www.adrive.com/public/a72806b...95eaad6e8.html

Basically, it's just the approach of "lemme dick around with this awesome tool and see if I can make something that looks half decent."

[töff]

So, the new orbital tracks ...

1. I finally got them spaced equally. I know, there's some gaps. But those are for the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the Heliopause. I think. I don't remember. Anyway, they were intentional. The Asteroid Belt and the gas giants all have double-wide tracks.
2. I used those tracks to mask that awesome pancake texture. I had taken that texture into Photoshop and thrashed it for a while, trying to disguise it -- turned it blue, did funky shading -- but honestly, it's just too cool a texture not to use as is. I know, it's kinda obviously a pancake here, but by the time everything else gets layered in, it won't be so obvious.
3. Then I want to give the inner edge of each track a highlight, and the outer edge a shadow -- the idea being that the sun in the middle is gonna light their inner edges -- get it? I couldn't find an easy way to do that in PS. I'm all about doing things the easy way. I could done it one track at a time, through some clever slection & deselection and masking etc., but I wanted an easier method. I went back to Illustrator and just made a gradient fill with a buncha whites & blacks, their points aligned to the tracks. It's not perfect, and I might fiddle some more ... or I might not.
4. So, my funny gradient as HardLight on top of the pancake, and it looks like I wanted it to, kinda 3D.
5. Then for kicks I ran black & white lines around the middles of the tracks, and blurred them, to make it look like slots where the planets roll or slide or whatever. I might fiddle more with the slots, too.

[töff]

The zodiac shading is gonna help disguise the pancake around the outer edges.

Here's a rough view.