Exo Planet Orbit

This is an earth-like planet in orbit around Zeta Tucanae. At present the star is not known to have planets, but I'm taking artistic license!

A wider view of this same planet can be seen here: [link]

All the textures were custom painted - from scratch - in Photoshop. No photos, nothing - that was the point of the exercise.

This view is about as close as one can get before the textures begin not to hold up that well...

Painting the clouds was a nightmarish process that required numerous test renders to see the effect when lit in 3D, then jumping back to Photoshop and tweak it some more. But I wanted to break away from using the cloud map that is very prevalent in a lot of 3D planet art.

Incidentally, the shadows cast by the clouds are actual raytraced shadows, and the red shift at the terminator is a result of some complex 3D shader work. No matter where the "Sun" is, the color shift into the shadow remains accurate.