Dead World

The dry, rocky world of Kentargus III and the surrounding ring of sparse asteroids. While some valuable heavy mineral deposits have been discovered on the planet, its inhospitable nature and dangerous asteroid belt have prevented it from being mined extensively.

-How I Made It-

Starfield – I started with ’s awesome starfield tutorial, here [link] . After merging all of the glow layers I hid that layer and created a second starfield using the same process. With the top starfield set to screen, I put an Apophysis image between the two (a render->clouds would work as well) set to screen and 50% opacity. Above all that I added a pale blue render->clouds set to soft light and 50% opacity to the whole canvas, then above that I used added a red-orange cloud to the area that you see set to screen. Voila!

Planet – I used ’s extremely helpful tutorial for planets (or what I remembered from it off the top of my head) here [link] I followed most of it pretty closely, with a few tweaks of my own here and there that I honestly wouldn’t be able to distinguish just from memory. I do remember that I actually used an image of some cracks in a rock for the clouds, though. Pretty cool, eh?

Asteroids – For this one I used a trick I learned a while ago. I created a new brush from a simple rough shape, then went into brush settings and used the “shape dynamics” and “scattering” options. I actually created a few different shapes and brushes and used different settings for each set, figure out which ones work for you. Honestly, by this point I was getting pretty tired with the piece so I sped through the rest of it. I created three layers, one for farther asteroids (smaller), mediums, and closer (bigger) asteroids. I then copied a rocky texture to them and messed with the color balance, then I used an inner shadow effect on each layer to simulate the light from the sun. Tada!

I may have forgotten a few things, but that’s the price I get for writing this the day after. Oh well. That’s the gist of what I did.