Personal Project at Saddington Baynes
All Aspects

3D - Zbrush (for the planet) Maya / Vray (planet, clouds), Houdini (asteroids, clouds and sun pyro FX), 2D - Nuke, Photoshop

This is a project that came about when I had a bunch of assets I had made for another project (called Love Beyond - hence the name). Being a big fan of Astronomy and the cosmos in general, I took a bit of time between work projects to re-purpose these into a spacey scene, depicting an early solar system, the home to a rocky planet starting to cool. It was pretty enjoyable, as I got to do the whole thing and take it to completion myself, and, well, it's space. I love space.

The sun is a noise-textured sphere with a houdini pyro sim emitting from it. There are 2 layers of cloud, one a general Maya fluid cloud providing a general volumetric layer. The other is a Houdini cloud, providing the bigger clumps. The asteroids are copies of a few different asteroid shapes copy stamped around the sun in an orbit. There is a layer of sparky Nuke particles flying throughout, just to give a bit more depth.

The planet was sculpted in Zbrush to get the general craggy shape, define where the lava flows were etc., and then the details were textured in photoshop. There were a few particle sims on the surface (for small volcanoes and the meteorite hit). 

By the way, I fully realise this is entirely physically inaccurate in terms of scale, speed, exposure etc., and it would probably annoy me if it was someone else’s project, but hey, y'know.... Don't be THAT person.