Hey everyone and welcome to Manip Academy #5!
I often see artists using external planet resources - which is fine, but I guess what many photomanipulators don't know is that it's actually really easy to create planets in Photoshop yourself! There are many methods to do it, some of them covered in the deviantart tutorial section. The best of all, neither painting skills nor tablet are required!
In this quick guide I want to show you how you can create your own planet from scratch with the Photoshop 3D tools.
Warning: this tip was written with Photoshop CS5 Extended and Photoshop CC. The procedure might be slightly different in other versions