How to make a realistic planet in Blender 2


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The planet surface material

Of course, a very important thing is the kind of textures we choose and the way we are going to use them. For the Golden Planet main color I used this texture (it's a faked Venus color map that you can easily find on the net):

But before the textures comes the general material setting for the planet surface:

You can see that I used all the eight texture slots, and we are going to see all of them in detail. First, this is the setting for the color map ("colvenus"):

I applied the texture in uv mapping (a simple "from window" option from above), but actually orco mode would have worked too.
(Well, of course, if you are doing a whole planet you have to apply it in sphere mode...)

The color map applied. Then I loaded a grey scale version of the same texture both for the specularity and the diffuse channel ("specvenus" and "diffvenus"):

And then also for the emit channel ("emitvenus"):

At this point, because the texture has not defined continents, it's time to create someone. I used this slightly modified (the "rivers") Earth map and I created its alpha channel (the checkered background is the Gimp's one):

Seems that in Blender the limit for tga with alpha channel is a 4000 dpi image; bigger targas with transparency don't show in the rendering, nor in the texture's preview window. But the image has to have an alpha channel of its own because, as you can see here, it must work as a "stencil":

This is the result ("maskoceani"); the stencil map works on the specularity and has a little bump effect too...

... and, as you can see in the below image (rendered with only the stencil channel active), the stencil map "splits" the seas from the lands.

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