Well I was reading around the net today and saw this article by a fellow Gimp (he may be on the forums, not sure) and
http://blog.patdavid.net/2012/05/on-little-planets.html

You can read it here: http://justpaste.it/Gimp_Wee_Planets_Tut

This one is very simple, uses only one filter and is pretty easy to follow; but for the additional steps you do need Resynthesizer and the Heal Transparency script that should come with it from here:

Nice tut Z; really a big fan of Micro-worlds (mini-planets; lol). Definitely more then a few ways to create these in GIMP. There's even a G'MIC preset to create these.

Didn't know that....*sigh once again beaten by the plugs that won't load right....

Another technique that I've been experimenting wit is using thier's Pan to Bow (360 degs) and filling the center with stuff. Of course, there's a Mathmap preset that can help with these too as I recall. Haven't done one of these in quite a while I have to admit. Again, thanks for the tut though. Again, justpasteit is the best thing since sliced bread. lol

Agree on that, tried getting that to work with .doc is a pain in the arse though, uses one image over and over and over again. Then you have to go back and correct each one.

I must get round to taking some more panoramas and making planets of them:



It's certainly easier getting the seam to join if you take enough pictures to get all 360 degrees round.

Kevin

And it really looks cool.

Yep, I'm here (just not as often as I'd like with a 16 month old child...)!

These are a lot of fun to make if you already have a panorama to start with. The images in my post were shot by me as part of testing out Hugin, so it was a relatively simple matter to just change the projection from equirectangular to stereographic (thus bypassing GIMP Polar Coordinates), but the idea is the same.

One of the neat things about the Hugin package is that it includes Enblend (masking and combining edges softly), as well as the ability to correct all the individual images for exposure blending as well (though sometimes the results are not what you'll want). For instance, in my cathedral image the exposure blending caused nasty color effects to come out of highlights, and I found it better to actually just use the re-mapped images from Hugin as layers and to manually blend the seams.

I actually had to do some judicious masking and gradient fills in the sky to remove some ugly banding effects that cropped up there as well, but I was pleased with the final result I think.

And thanks for the idea of using resynthesizer on the sky extensions, it hadn't actually occurred to me to use it! (I love learning little tips like these from the community!)

I hope you don't mind me using your article as a basis for this tut? But I may have to update it now with the sky gradient steps.

Absolutely, positively do not mind in the least (and am quite flattered). Besides, just about everything on my blog is cc-by-sa licensed anyway...

On a side note, you can try generating masks for the skies if they are usually blue/white by investigating channel decomposition, or some variations (high pass comes to mind also). On the image of the cathedral, all the sky from about 11 - 4 o'clock had to be reformed from a gradient (that'll teach me to shoot all those as .jpgs).