Here’s the second work in my homeworld series. I plan to continue it with more artwork in the future, refining my style and procedural planet workflow as I go.
Breakdown
Rather than making the entire surface of the planet a single biome like a lot of popular franchises, I decided to break it up and add some variation. This improves the realism a lot - after all, earth isn’t all forests, plains, and aquatics, it also has a plenty of deserts, tundras, and plains. Even though this planet is primarily ice and aquatics, it should still have a fairly diverse range of terrain types. It’s mostly composed of cold deserts, icy aquatics, cold tundras, and frozen mountains.
To create the main continents, I used voronoi textures distorted by noise. I mixed in a smaller scale voronoi to break it up and create subcontinents and lower-frequency terrain.
Finally, I clipped a distance voronoi texture that was distorted by the same noise and used it as an ocean map.
The clouds are a separate sphere that’s slightly larger than the surface sphere to add to the depth. I used a volumetric shader.
I reused the planet atmosphere recipe from my previous planet project. It’s not all that accurate, but it renders quickly and I like it aesthetically. It’s artistically versatile, and gives it a nice sci-fi style.
Since it uses an emission shader, and I’m rendering in cycles, it doesn’t react to light out of the box. So I used a trick. The Lamp Mask group takes the dot product of the angle of the camera and the normals of the planet, which I can then use as a mask to control the strength of the atmosphere. I add a bit to the value to create a slight falloff around the edge.
The geometry itself was created in geometry nodes. It wasn’t necessary, but it was a nice way of keeping everything organized and I preferred it over using a bunch of objects with modifiers.
