Guide to creating small planets
posted Jul 8th 2008 8:45pm by Juan Aguilarfiled under: misc hacks
We at Hackaday often dream of having our own personal planets where we wouldn’t have to deal with other people, but our spaceships aren’t quite ready. While we figure that out, you can do the next best thing: render small planets using Photoshop or GIMP with a few other graphics apps and this guide to making small planets like the one pictured above.
The first step is in the photography itself. You’ll want an equirectangular panoramic image that includes more natural terrain like grass or dirt than man made terrain like streets or sidewalks, as this is easier to work with. Take approximately six photos from a tripod-mounted camera, turning the camera about 30 degrees after each photo. This should give you a full 360 degree panoramic landscape stitched from the individual photos.
Next you’ll want to do the actual stitching: this can be done very carefully in Photoshop, but a light imaging app called PTGui makes the job go much more quickly. Resize the image so that it is squared (uncheck “Constrain proprotions”), then rotate it so the sky is on the bottom (flip vertical works too, but the image will be a reflection). Then go into the filters and select the Polar Coordinates filter, from which you will choose the “Rectangular to polar” option. That’s all there is to it.
See the guide for another way to create small planets; it doesn’t make real ones either, at least you can add to this Flickr pool featuring small planets.
lol nice one … reminds me of some book i red in 9th grade … forgot the name
Posted at 9:23 pm on Jul 8th, 2008 by alex mccown