Infinite_Spaces.
Member
- Nov 4, 2025
- 37
- 68
This is for all you planet makers out there:
This cloud image from NASA has been used for countless planets in games, TV shows, movies etc. Since its one of the best images of its kind, and free.
Anyone who creates alot of planets will know this since its kinda easy to recognise, and so, if you want to make your shiny new planet more unique when seen from afar, your either stuck with procedural clouds which mostly arent great when used as cloud texture maps, or the better alternative is to turn to a high-res image like this one and make some seemless tiles.
The problem with this though is the original image shared by NASA was made up of thousands of tiles, and while it looked fine as a whole at lower resolutions, the actual 43K version when seen at 1:1 showed thousands of tiling/radar errors as well as areas that were completley blown out, or very sharp/pixelated.
Now this makes complete sense, since no one is likely to use the entire 43K image as a texture map at that res, but its a huge pain when you need go in and grab some crops to make tiles, especialy since most people who need to do this are normaly 3D artists, and wont always know how to fix the issues that show up.
The image shared above, is the 43K version but after i spent about 3years cleaning it up over various (multi hour) passes:
Above is one example of the thousands of fixes i made, i tried to stay as true to the original as possible at each instance.
While i like to think i got all of them, its also still possible i didnt catch a few since the 43K original is vast, and the errors are visualy tiny. Indeed the reason it took so long to do was each time i thought i was done, i would find more errors after some time had passed, in the end though, i couldnt find any more when i looked, so i think it should now be good enough for anyone to drop in and grab a crop from, without worrying too much about errors showing up.
The image (which was my own goto for cloud textures for many many years) is now free for all to use and should be considered public domain, im sharing it here along with four 10x10Kpx seemless tiles already made from it, as CC0.
Note: While i give up all rights (for the photoshop donkey-work) to the image(s) by sharing them as CC0, NASA should still be credited.
Warning: The 43K clouds image will require a beefy machine to edit or even see, you will likely get a crash of some type if you try to look at it without a good PC/GPU/RAM combo. Windows is likely to freeze for a moment even clicking the image as it tries to get its head around how big it actually is.
Download
(Google Drive)
License: CC0
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Google Drive)
License: CC0
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This cloud image from NASA has been used for countless planets in games, TV shows, movies etc. Since its one of the best images of its kind, and free.
Anyone who creates alot of planets will know this since its kinda easy to recognise, and so, if you want to make your shiny new planet more unique when seen from afar, your either stuck with procedural clouds which mostly arent great when used as cloud texture maps, or the better alternative is to turn to a high-res image like this one and make some seemless tiles.
The problem with this though is the original image shared by NASA was made up of thousands of tiles, and while it looked fine as a whole at lower resolutions, the actual 43K version when seen at 1:1 showed thousands of tiling/radar errors as well as areas that were completley blown out, or very sharp/pixelated.
Now this makes complete sense, since no one is likely to use the entire 43K image as a texture map at that res, but its a huge pain when you need go in and grab some crops to make tiles, especialy since most people who need to do this are normaly 3D artists, and wont always know how to fix the issues that show up.
The image shared above, is the 43K version but after i spent about 3years cleaning it up over various (multi hour) passes:
Above is one example of the thousands of fixes i made, i tried to stay as true to the original as possible at each instance.
While i like to think i got all of them, its also still possible i didnt catch a few since the 43K original is vast, and the errors are visualy tiny. Indeed the reason it took so long to do was each time i thought i was done, i would find more errors after some time had passed, in the end though, i couldnt find any more when i looked, so i think it should now be good enough for anyone to drop in and grab a crop from, without worrying too much about errors showing up.
The image (which was my own goto for cloud textures for many many years) is now free for all to use and should be considered public domain, im sharing it here along with four 10x10Kpx seemless tiles already made from it, as CC0.
Note: While i give up all rights (for the photoshop donkey-work) to the image(s) by sharing them as CC0, NASA should still be credited.
Warning: The 43K clouds image will require a beefy machine to edit or even see, you will likely get a crash of some type if you try to look at it without a good PC/GPU/RAM combo. Windows is likely to freeze for a moment even clicking the image as it tries to get its head around how big it actually is.
