There's quite a bit of world-building within the Starlight Universe novels, but today I'm going to talk about literal world-building. As much as I love writing, it is my planets that earn me the most fame and glory. I've done work on the Star Trek Adventures Tabletop RPG, an ongoing Stellaris mod, and of course, the numerous planets featured on this very website. So whenever the opportunity to make a new planet comes my way, I always seize the opportunity.
If you've perused the Starlight Universe website, you've probably seen a planet or two. Perhaps you've even stopped to admire one of them for a moment?! 💖 But you probably haven't spent very much time considering how these myriad worlds come together. There are plenty of programs out there that will generate a planet for you (and some of them look pretty nice), but since I would hate to convenience myself with such a remarkable program, I do just about all of the artwork myself.
I'm not going to go into the exact details, because the creation process is almost certainly boring. Instead, I'm going to provide some insight into the broader strokes that went into the creation of my latest planet. It's just some unnamed rock for the Stellaris mod, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll call it Ferox II.
Every world starts as a literal blank slate--as in, open Photoshop, create new file. That sort of blank slate. If I have something specific in mind for the continents, I will sketch them onto the canvas at this point. I had no such plans for Ferox II, so I strolled over to Azgaar's Map Generator and allowed it to generate a few continents for me. (But since the mod required a mostly rocky planet with some lakes, I used the continents as lakes and kept what otherwise would have been oceans as land).
After the continents are in place, I have to texture everything. A lot of the textures are from NASA, but quite often I will fill in the blanks with something mundane like a splotch of rust or a patch of concrete. You'd be surprised what makes for an interesting geological feature. Anyway, once that's done, I just have to color it. Check out the time-lapsed video below!
I should note that these textures are massive. I make them in 8k, so the amount of detail is absolutely stunning. Sometimes I will even go so far as to map out the trade winds and underwater currents to properly develop the biomes, but since Ferox II is mostly a hunk of rock, I didn't do that this time. This planet fall squarely into the "because it looks cool" development process.
Below is the finished texture in its entirety. In a tiny form, of course, so that it's not worth stealing.
But here it is up close...
Because I have the texture for the entire planet, I can turn it into a fully 3D model, which renders up the very nice images you've come to know and love.
