Planets/Moons

[Thomas]

Creating planets and moons are no hocus pocus, BUT terra forming them realistically is. We have developed a method for doing just that and will be presenting this AND more in this section

[Thomas]

Let's take a look at how my Gatekeeper terra forming works - but first: Terra forming is making a planet livable with an atmosphere, plants, animals and what have you.

Our first terra forming involved our next door planet Mars - which as you may know is terra formed in the time frame of Star Trek. So how did we go about doing this in a realistic way without just slapping on some plants and water?

Well - we started off with what is often referred to as a flat map or texture map for planets. This is a map of an entire planet which - when wrapped around a CGI sphere - forms an exact surface of that very planet. And so we started off with an exceptional detailed map created by NASA (here in low res).

[Thomas]

Now as you can see the landscape consist of darker and lighter areas depending on how high or low the landscape is - the darker areas being low and the lighter areas being high over the surface.

By removing all areas darker than a specific shade and replacing it with ocean blue we divide the planet in land and water (we'll be leaving the ice alone).

We then adjust the result to get a beautiful visual for our planet (a bit of artistic liberties should be allowed for your entertainment) and start painting in textures and colour variations in the water to demonstrate how deep the water is.

[Thomas]

BUT - as we know from Earth a sphere shaped planet will catch the light from the Sun differently at the equator than it would by the poles, and so the vegetation will look differently.

We therefore painted a planet texture with moderate vegetation compared to Earth to tell the two apart and keep a bit of the well known red tones for our Mars.

We superimposed this texture on all the land masses and did a manual touch up. This gave the planet an icy area at the poles, a dry area round the equator, and vegetation in between while the touchup gave the areas closest to the sea a bit more vegetation even at the equator given the water supply.

[Thomas]

And finally we gave the planet an atmosphere which is visible at a certain altitude! Civilization and manmade structures are never visible this high up during the day, but at night all the city lights can be seen from a great distance!