Gliese 581 C

Last week a friend and I were talking Sci-Fi and he told me about an extrasolar planet Nasa has found and named "Gliese 581 C". Here is a link to the Wiki Article: Gliese

They believe it to be an ice world within Habital range of its Sun. Oddly one side of the planet always faces the Sun. I found this idea inspiring and decided to make my own mock-up of what a planet like this might look like:


Believe it or not there are no 3D elements in this render but rather it is a composite of different Nasa images of planets layered and painted on.

Product: Sci-Fi Texture Pack!

I'm proud to announce the release of my first Texture pack.

Sci-Fi Textures by Pectabyte.com

Here are a couple previews of the Textures that are included:


Sci-Fi Textures includes 63, totally original, tile-able textures designed to create 17 unique materials for your level or model. This Texture pack is priced and designed for the hobbyist or independent environment designer.

This Zip file contains:
18 Diffuse Maps
16 Normal Maps
24 Specular Maps
4 Ambient Occlusion Maps
1 Opacity Map

Textures are 2048x2048 or 1024X1024 in .tga format and have been tested with Unreal Engine 3 and are game ready.

Click Here to Visit the Purchase Page.

Unity. Sweet Sweet Unity.

So for the last week or so I've been playing with Unity Game Engine. REALLY Impressive stuff. Its amazing how versatile this Engine is. I checked it out because I'm looking to expand past Unreal 3 not that there is anything wrong with it but rather because the pipeline can be very difficult for a single artist to produce a highly polished looking level that plays and feels good. I take pride in creating my own models, textures and shaders and Unreal can be a rather hard beast to tame when doing all of that yourself. Unity on the other hand seems to be design with small Dev teams and individuals in mind. Its very liberal about what file formats it accepts and the whole process of creating shaders in Engine is stream lined. I've had a lot of fun playing with the Cell Shaders. The following are some screenshots of a "Just for fun" game I've been working on.

Textures

So here are two examples of the textures I'm using in the map I posted screen shots of yesterday. I made these by hand in Photoshop. Diffuse, Specular and Normal. I'm new at "from scratch" texturing but I think these are pretty good newbie attempts. Now bare in mind when viewing them they are compressed from 2048px Targa files to 800px web compressed jpegs.



My creation method seems to be sound its just painting technique I noticed I lack. I'm sure a wack-off tablet would make things easier but being a starving artist I don't have $100+ to drop on a decent one. I'm thinking of making a video tutorial for making spaceship textures from scratch once I'm done with this project and refine my methods.