Hey everyone. I've been surfing around on the intarweb recently and found a very nice tutorial on how to make realistic planets, and after my 4th try I think I got the hang of it. Click here to see it. I personally believe that it looks real enough. It's far from perfect but not bad for 4th try right? What do you guys think?

wow, thats pretty cool, for your fourth try I'd say it's at least 1000 kinds of awesome.

I'm interested now, was that really time consuming to make?

its quite nice, what program did you use to make it?

I like the lens flare effect on the back of the planet, it really gives the effect of a sun and the shadow that was cast was also a great effect.

The little stars are a bit plain, and the background doesn't really have that much of an effect to it. Maybe add a supernova effect or something?

I really like what you did though so nice job and keep up the great work

quite easy to make with Studio Max 3D. You have a background, light flare, sphere with some texture.... and some light effect on this sphere Looks very nice. However it's a bit too dark in my opinion..

That planet was done all in photoshop, no 3d editing involved. It's not too terribly work intensive, so if you don't take the time to tweak everything to perfection it should only take about 20 minutes to half an hour. I really didn't tweak too much but it still took me about an hour, hour and a half to complete. Glad that you guys liked it AS for the starry background that was just trown in there to break up an otherwise monotonous background. Now that I got the planets down fairly well I can elaborate on the backgrounds.

Yeah really nice planet, i like the overcast shadow look and the lens flare to add some great contrast my suggestion is to try and make a bigger piece maybe with the milky-way and other small galaxies and have the planet incorporated into it. You can see some really great ones on DeviantArt.com. But for fourth go that it awsum, the planet's got a really great feel with the texture and everything added to it, and personally i don't find it too dark i think it's just right Awsum Job

The ones on Deviant art are amazing, that's where I found the tutorial on how to make them. Alyn` is the person that wrote the tutorial for it, and his work is amazing. With the way my 4th planet turned out, it won't take too awfully long before I can make imagesresembling his work on a smaller scale.

But thanks for the feedback. Having others point out your mistakes makes improvement easier and faster.

I really like what you have made here. The stars and varying brightnesses of them is very well done, although to me it looks like there are a tad too many of them. The lens-flare that you have used is perfect and a great colour choice there. The texture that you have used is great and not too dark at all.

It looks as though some areas are very pixilated, but i don't know how you optimised the image or how big of an image can be hosted on Photobucket.

For a fourth attempt it is very good. i really like it. well done.

Ok, here's another image using that planet in a wallpaper size. It contains my first attempt at creating a nebula and a different method of creating a star field. Click here to see it. What do you guys think of this one?

Gorgeous and really realistic looking! Awesome job, especially on the second one!

I love the stars on the first one. The lighting and everything is perfect!