How to Create an Earth-Like Planet in GIMP

By creating an Earth-like planet in Gimp, you're making something completely imaginary appear realistic, a skill that entertainment industries, especially fantasy video games and movies, value highly. One of the Gimp tools essential to creating a realistic Earth-like planet is the program's set of filters. Filters are geometrical calculations that transform your images in ways that closely mimic real-world phenomena like lens distortions and shading. When you apply these filters to simple shapes painted with the program's "Paintbrush" tool, you transform those shapes into the components of an Earth-like planet.

Instructions

1. Click the paintbrush icon on the tool palette, then click the upper color swatch at the bottom of the tool palette. Click a brown hue from the color palette, then drag the mouse in a zigzag fashion on the canvas until much of the canvas is covered in brown. These strokes form the foundation of an Earth-like texture.

2. Click the tool palette icon shaped like a dashed ellipse, then drag on the center of the canvas to define a circular selection region. Press "Control" and "C" simultaneously to copy the selection to the clipboard, then press and hold "Control" and "Shift" simultaneously. Press "V" to paste the Earth texture into a new Gimp document.

3. Right click the single item in the "Layers" menu, then click "Alpha to selection" to select the texture you just pasted. Click the "Filter" menu's "Lens" command, which applies a distortion that makes shapes and textures look spherical, then click "OK" to apply the "Lens" command.

4. Run the "Alpha to selection" command again, as you did in step three, then click the "Layers" window's page icon to make a new layer. The selection region will appear over the new layer, which is needed to create the sphere for the planet.

5. Click the "Sphere designer" item of the "Filter" command, then click "OK" to accept the default settings for creating a sphere. Drag the top item of the "Layers" window, which holds the sphere you just made, under the bottommost layer. This makes your texture appear atop the sphere.

6. Click the top item of the "Layers" window to select that layer, then drag the "Layers" window's "Opacity" slider until it displays approximately 50 percent. This enables the sphere's lighting to fill out the Earth texture, which makes that texture appear spherical.

7. Right click the top item in the "Layers" window, then click "Merge" visible layers. Click the "Filter" menu's "Gaussian blur" command to make the edges of the Earth-like planet fuzzy, and to complete your planet.

References

• "The Gimp User Manual"; Gimp documentation team; 2009