This was made using the new 2.3A build of Blender. I used procedural generation for the terrain. I had a lot of fun “matching” together textures for the shader on the terrain itself. originally wanted to go for some micro polygon displacement, but the plane was already like 400k verts so for the first time I couldn’t render with cycles adaptive subdivision because I would run out of memory. Oh well, these still turned out pretty sweet.
I used the 2D nebula from Mark sourced from a blend file by Midge mantissa. I ended up feeling that the first two images were missing something. With the addition of the 3D nebula from Curtis Holt, I was very happy with the depth of the final two images.
nebulas made with help from
Midge Mantissa mantissa.xyz
Curtis Holt https://www.artstation.com/curtisjamesholt
Mark Kingsnorth https://blendermarket.com/creators/mark-kingsnorth