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Got Air?
here are more techniques for atmospheric
disturbances
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more:tutorials
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Ok, it's time to get serious
about adding an atmosphere to our planet. The screenshot at left
shows an example of what's possible. It's nicely turbulent, with
hurricanes in 3 areas. There are two types opf cloud layers, at
different levels of opacities or brightness, and there's also some
about of shadow dropping to cast shadows onto the oceans underneath.
We can also use the paper
texture option to show waves on the water and puffy globules on the
clouds.
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click for larger image ^
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Here's an example
of paper texture used for waves on the ocean. The clouds are
unfinished.
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This example shows some
paper texture added to the clouds. Not very clean in the coloring and
embossing, but it shows the idea.
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hmm.....Not too bad. Not bad
at all. I like it!
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so, now then....The Twirl Tool -
make your own
Taifun
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Of course this can
also serve for making tropical depressions at a grand scale... such as
galaxies.
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Find the Twirl tiool under the Filter
> Transform menu.
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Use the
hand icon to drag and place the eye of the hurricane.
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You can
leave it at the current place by clicking 'keep' and start moving
another storm.
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After
moving the second one down, play with the Factor, Size, Opacity, etc...
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You will want to
experiment with other patterns to start from, such as the
self-displaced Spikey mode of the
Filters>Render>Bumpy-Toy
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If you know you're going to work
in ALpha at some point, perhaps a Black/White image will work too,
using the Threshold filter. |
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Here's
an interesting approach: use a high power, strong factor and large size
but with a low opacity, to mimic high altitude thin Cirrus clouds. The
original clouds remain partially visible because of the transparency.
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A second hurricane is
in place, and we yank the opacity back to the max for the same
locations.
Now this starts to look like lower-alt patchy clouds along the
hurricane's main arms.
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Here's
another example, with several more cyclones and anti-cyclones to match
the systems on either side of the equator.
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Store the Alpha. I know, we
don't have Alpha in place yet. but...
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But we can press "Get
Buffer" and this will grab the current buffer image as greyscale and
let you work on it for later use as alpha.
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Simply click the
Replace button for that. The greyscale is transferred into Alpha.
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One way to use it is
to pick the whole image up as a brush image, including the Alpha. Or
you can chroma-key the brush sgainst the secondary color to set opacity
levels.
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Once the
image is loaded into the custom brush, we can activate the PostFX
features of the brush. A little bit of embossing and shadows goes a
long way to make the clouds look like they hover over the water and
cast shadows on it.
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Well, it's time to put it all to
work. Here's a first example, of a seemingly dry hot planet with clouds.
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< click for larger view
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And here's a wet planet covered with water. >
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the big picture? |
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A.D. 1,000,000
roughly 1 million years from now, the Moon will be closer to
Earth, or not. If it is closer, it might make very large
solar exclipses, but it might also be torn apart by gravitational pull.
It might superheat and start melting its core again.
Well we can dream...
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And finally, there's gonna be a ring
around the planet.
Here's the very few days of the breaking apart of the Moon that feeds
the ring.
dedicated to
Beam-me-up-"Scotty"
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