I've been using LunarCell for making the planets and moons in my Firefly TC. Its quite good for solid planets/moons; with a little creative settings adjustment, I was able to make a passable gas giant as well.

However, I need to make a ringed planet, and LunarCell doesn't seem to support that. Anyone know of another program that can do that, or a good method of achieving that result in Photoshop?

(On a related note, is there a quick way, aside from copy/paste, to make a gas giant with dozens of tiny moons (all part of the same spin)? I'll need to do one of those eventually...)

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Well you could go into any 3D program, create the ring and a placeholder planet, and then use Photoshop to replace the placeholder with your lunarcell planet.

Matrix

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Sounds easy enough. However, the only 3D programs I have are Blender and Cinema 4D, and I don't have any experience with either (aside from fiddling around randomly with them). What sort of thing would I need to do in order to make rings?

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I would offer suggestion, but my copy of Cinema has expired and I'm too lazy to find my MacAddict registration code, lost among my thousands of miscellanious files.

But from my knowledge of AutoDesk VIZ, isn't there some kind of automatic toroid tool?

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When viewing a Terrapin for the first time, I realized that anything flies-if you throw it hard enough!

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Originally posted by Zzap212:
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But from my knowledge of AutoDesk VIZ, isn't there some kind of automatic toroid tool?

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somehow i think that went right over the guy's head zzap...

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Well, the process is only somewhat simple. First you make a torus (a donut - should be a primative that you can just click a button and create), and scale it so that it flattens into a ring. You can control the thickness of the ring when you create it usually. Then the hard part is making a ring texture in Photoshop, and then mapping it to the ring object.

Matrix

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"Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought -- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things." - Woody Allen

(url="http://"http://htf.mondominishows.com/valentine/main.asp?seed=7375&serial;=214877")The funniest valentine I've ever gotten.(/url)

What do you mean, Cunjo?

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When viewing a Terrapin for the first time, I realized that anything flies-if you throw it hard enough!

Quote

Originally posted by what_is_the_matrix:
**Well, the process is only somewhat simple. First you make a torus (a donut - should be a primative that you can just click a button and create), and scale it so that it flattens into a ring. You can control the thickness of the ring when you create it usually. Then the hard part is making a ring texture in Photoshop, and then mapping it to the ring object.

Matrix

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I'm pretty sure I can do that much. As for texturing it from Photoshop....I guess I'll just figure that out by experimentation.

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....and its pretty hard to experiment when I can't find the option to apply a texture to an object. With all those options, you'd think they'd have one that just said "APPLY TEXTURE".

Where is it?

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Originally posted by Lindley:
**....and its pretty hard to experiment when I can't find the option to apply a texture to an object. With all those options, you'd think they'd have one that just said "APPLY TEXTURE".

Where is it?

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In strata there is a bar that shows all textures. all I have to do Is click and hold on a texture and drag it to the object I want to texture.

I don't know about any other programs, but I assume that if there is not a button or command then It must work that way.

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Well, I found a tutorial online, and with a little experimenting, I succeeded in creating my first non-Terragen 3D render! I'm quite excited about the result, despite it being fairly pedestrian by most standards......I used a LunarCell image as the texture for a sphere, and I figure out how to make a ring texture for the torus.

Here's the results:

DVD Screencap I was trying to emulate:

Final result:

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Nice planet, got a link to that tutorial?

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Here it is. Its pretty big:

ftp://ftp2.maxon.net...d_r85_tut_e.zip

(For Cinema 4D, to be clear.)

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