Tiny planets
Shader Project - Asset Creation
Overview
I was asked how to make images of a variety of planets for a table top role playing game. Half remembering a blog post I saw somewhere but couldn't find I recreated a method for generating procedural planets on a single quad.
By tweaking a few parameters you can easily generate different styles of planet.
Approach
Build in the shader node editor in Blender. The shader takes the UVs of the quad and distorts them into a spherical shape.
Using noise functions and colour ramps this quickly transforms into a tiny planet. Generating normals from the distorted UVs also enables simple lighting to be applied to the planet.