Aerial Shot - A new direction

 The director provided feedback on my last concept. He's come up with a new sequence, as follows:

Shot 1: Planet (Low Orbit) showing the local region

Shot 2: Aerial shot showing the rugged location of the up-and-coming service road scenes with a mountain range backdrop and, further back, a coastline and an island that features a city from which plumes of smoke are visible.

This seems to flow better, but it's going to be a challenge to smoothly segue from a very high altitude to a lower one. Do I need to create a planetary texture that features the landforms that are visible in the follow-on shot? Yes, I think I do.

What first?

What does the planet look like?

Draw it!

Calantica is a young world with a single major continent and a tectonic system that runs straight along the equator. The main human settlement, New Caligari, is located just north of the equator, surrounded by numerous resource-gathering settlements.

The area of interest is located on the coast of a small northern sea with a more moderate climate.

I tried to sketch the regional area but found it very hard to project accurately. 

What next?

Build it!

1. Grab a big Earth texture map. I used a 16k map.

2. Clone the sea and make that the top layer. 

3. Import the sketched planet map, and use your image editor's tools to cut away the background. 

4. Create another layer and use it to trace the coastline in a black outline. This is where you can create the fine detail that will make the most of your 16k resolution. Once you have the coastline outline, fill it with black. It's a mask!

5. The sea around coastlines is lighter because continental shelves are shallow. One way to get that light-blue coastal sea is to create a copy of the landmass mask, paint it light blue, and apply a strong blur. Once you're happy, you can merge the deep-sea and coastal shallows layers.

6. Now use the landmass mask to cut a hole in the sea layer through which the familiar terrain of planet Earth will show through.

7. This part is fun/therapeutic. Use your image editor's powerful clone / infill brush  to paint into the big gaps using Earth's biomes. Careful brushing can create appropriate biomes such as mountain ranges, dry and temperate zones. Start by getting the land filled in without worrying too much about the details.

8. Once your land is filled in, start blending and cloning away the harsh borders.

9. You'll need a specularity map that will make the seas more reflective than the land. This is easy to create using a white layer and your land mask. There's an extra step, though! While creating the land textures, you should include big rivers and lakes, which also need to be selected, copied on top of the spec mask, and set as white patches, so they catch the light just like the oceans.

10. You might need a displacement map, although this can be fudged using Blender nodes. In True SKY 3, the Earth shader already does this.

Well, that's the easy part done. There will be fine-tuning required once you are happy with your staging, so you will understand which areas need the most attention to detail.