I've been 'scarce' around here for the past couple of months, mainly because I have been working on a very resource-intensive project for a client which left me no time (and no spare computer resources) for projects of a personal nature...
One of the images developed for this client involved a 'space' image. As the work progressed, this crystallized into an image of the Solar System's planets and a background starfield. "No problem," thought I, "I've got image maps of all of the planets as resources for planet-building..." When I went to find them, however, I discovered that, in a move between computers at some point in the past, I had misplaced them... Which turned out to be a blessing! In looking them up again on the internet, (the originals had come from NASA) I also came across a site called Planet Portal, containing maps of all of the Solar System's planets optimized for use in 3D programs! The only planet that was a 'kludge' was the map of Pluto. No planetary probe has ever visited that mysterious and puzzling orb on the outer fringes of the Solar System yet, so the map was a blend of the fuzzy light/dark patterns which is all that astronomers DO know at this point, overlaid over a more detailed map of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. While I was playing around with compositions for the image, something like this image occurred to me. I liked it for its extremely simple composition, but I realized it wouldn't be appropriate for the task at hand. Nevertheless, I put it on the back burner for later development. So, here is the Ganymede map from the site as, yes, Ganymede! The ship is a simple construct I had made while experimenting with Amapi a while ago. I decided to keep it for my 'spacefleet!'
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