Terraforming planets in Spore

In Spore we made a system that would procedurally generate an essentially infinite number of planets (more on that later).

Once the planets were created they would transform in various ways. They would go from icy to lava, from hard vacuum to a thick atmosphere, from dry to drenched. We had to come up with some way of representing that. This image shows a planet going through all those different states. The same landforms persist throughout.

I was pretty happy with this series, it demonstrated that we could wrench a planet through all of these transformations and it would look good and represent its state clearly. And you can zoom down to the surface while all this is going on and see the landscape change around you.

(click to enlarge)