Germanunkol: yeah the tutorial I follow is quite close to the Gimp one. I used too low resolution for the textures on the lot of the planets. The ice planet on the right isn't too good either. It's best to have the texture at least twice as big as the final planet result to get a good quality texture after spherize effect. Thanks for the link! Your planet looks beautiful on CSiS .

I still haven't found a nice way to create continents though, the tutorials you linked and I followed result in one solid texture, and the colour of the planet is a separate mix of layers which might give a faint hint that there are oceans and planets but if you look at a picture of earth, the tutorials never come close to the variety that a true earth planet has.



You see lush, deserts, oceans, cloud patches, shallow waters, mountain ridges, it's all well defined in reality.