A new tutorial, free planet texture maps and a crazy new plugin from Subblue
Chris Johnson-Standley’s new written tutorial, Create a Gas Giant Planet Scene in After Effects, over at Aetuts+ shows you how to make and texture your own planet scene using nothing more than After Effects. It’s a nice introduction to what’s possible using Fractal Noise to create textures from scratch.
Here’s a preview:
Planetary Texture Maps
If you’re in a hurry and don’t want to mess with making your own textures there are a few free spots on the Internets where you can download ‘em for free.
JHT’s Planetary Pixel Emporium has spherical maps for every planet in the solar system and even one for the sun and the moon. Most also have separate maps for clouds and bump. Just download ‘em and apply to CC Sphere for instant worlds.
NASA: Visible Earth: who knows Earth better than NASA? There’s a bunch spherical maps to choose from here including earth textures, clouds, topography and even one for city lights as seen from space.
Little Planets
Here’s an interesting new Pixel Bender plugin from Subblue that let’s you take a spherical map of a city or scene, usually available online as HDR images, and instead of wrapping it to a sphere it turns the image in on itself making a crazy, little planet. Subblue has a nice collection of other free Pixel Bender plugins that can create incredibly unique looks, though you may be hard pressed to find uses for some.
