I wanted to thank everyone for voting me RAFian Artist of the Year!!! As a thank you gift, I went ahead and made the Hork-Bajir Homeworld.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v508/Terenia/HB.jpg)
<Transparent,> I told the computer. The outer bulkhead in my cabin turned from blank gray
to clear. Outside I could see black space blazing with stars. But filling half my view was the
planet itself. Our new home.
For the most part it looked more like some dead moon than a living planet. Much of the
surface was dark gray, sterile rock. I knew from our briefing that there was only a very thin
atmosphere. It was cold. Bitterly cold. With air so thin that an Andalite could expect to
suffocate and die within thirty minutes.
But around the equator of the planet was a strange sight: huge, deep rifts, interwoven,
interconnected. It looked as if someone had stepped on the planet, squashing it like a ripe
ooka melon so that the sides had burst open.
-Aldrea, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
So, I think I may redo this a bit in the future. I wanted to get more of a sense of the equatorial valleys, especially the blue mist at the bottom. I wasn't sure how much you'd be able to see that from space, though. Instead I opted to make the planet look as ravaged as possible by the asteroid that had hit it. This was my first time working with creating a crack effect. I'm pretty pleased, but as I said, I may redo it later when I'm more confident.