A Brave New World - Planet Matte Painting

[AndrewJSmith]

Hello!

I decided to sharpen my matte painting skills by trying out something fun but challenging - painting an original planet. What do you think?
Feedback on how you think I could improve is always welcome.

First, I rendered a sphere from Blender 3D to use as my base.

Next, I extracted clouds, land masses and city lights from photos taken from the International space Station.

I arranged/blended all of these photo elements on top of my sphere using Photoshop.

The final result was then projected back onto my sphere inside of Blender (that way, I can animate a simple camera pan animation).