Stellar Icons From Space! From 2005!

Posted by Admiral on 2010-02-09 23:10:43, Originally created on 2005-10-30 19:30:12

When I created these, I just felt that I needed some icons from space. There's not much more to it. I used Blender for their execution. I took some spheres and wrapped some planetary texture maps around them, then added a raytraced shadow to give the icons the appearance that they were really sitting there on your desktop.

Yes, I know that the Earth is not transparent. It just looked so boring with all of that open blue space right in the middle there. I tried to cover the boring blue with clouds, but I couldn't find any decent cloud maps with sufficient resolution to do anything pretty with, so I decided to use NASA's "Bodies of Water" map as a transparency map, and I think it turned out pretty cool looking.

Planetary object texture maps lovingly stolen from NASA.

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Planet Earth:

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The Moon:

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Planet Mars:

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Planet Venus:

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Tags: 3d | blender | nasa | planets | space