I make planet textures, this is how I usually do it:
I take a few real planet/moon textures and basically mix them up on photoshop, tweak them here and there (remove some craters, add some craters, change colour, etc) until it looks like something completely new and unique. I also have a few where I made them from scratch, but those were much harder and were normally your typical blue life-bearing world type planet textures.
All of the planet textures are mounted on planets I made on the program called Celestia, it's a wonderful piece of software. It's free, just google it, you won't regret it.
This is one of my favourites, because I really had to experiment to get the desired effect. But it was so worth it. You might be able to see how I used parts of Titan's surface, if you're into that sort of thing.
Another angle to show how the surface glows red hot at the equator. I don't know how realistic this is, probably not, probably the entire planet would glow due to the diffusion of heat but I'm not sure. I just wanted the aesthetic effect.
A tidally locked planet, using parts of textures of many moons (including our own).
A planet I wanted to make look like it was made from a collision of two separate planets. I'm not sure if it's confirmed 100% or not but I heard some planets may be a mixture of one or more bodies in space. This is the effect I wanted, to make it look like it was made up of more than one single material. You can see the different kind of rock near the bottom of the planet. I started to notice after some tweaking that the front part had a very chipped and rocky look so I worked on it until it looked exaggerated.
Something that wasn't made up of other planet textures. This was made from scratch on photoshop. It's a life-bearing planet. I hate hate hate the colour of the sea, I think I'm going to change it. Too rich a blue and too close to indigo to look realistic IMO.
Again from another angle, showing the moon and the connection bridge between the two main continents (which are both situated at the poles made of bunched together continental plates like two polar Pangeas).
What do you think? Any suggestions?
I take a few real planet/moon textures and basically mix them up on photoshop, tweak them here and there (remove some craters, add some craters, change colour, etc) until it looks like something completely new and unique. I also have a few where I made them from scratch, but those were much harder and were normally your typical blue life-bearing world type planet textures.
All of the planet textures are mounted on planets I made on the program called Celestia, it's a wonderful piece of software. It's free, just google it, you won't regret it.
What do you think? Any suggestions?