Sirius_Alpha wrote:Another possibility to expand out the range of textures are the possibility of transitional textures. Of course the insolation a planet receives, for the simple case of a non-inclined planet (which I assume we'll be assuming, lacking information to the contrary) scales with latitude, φ as cos φ. Consider a Sudarsky Class III planet just inward of the "habitable zone." You might imagine it would have water cloud condensation at its polar areas. So you could imagine a III-II transition texture, where the polar areas resemble a Sudarsky Class II planet, and the equatorial and tropical region are more Sudarsky Class III. We see something similar going on at Saturn, where the polar areas took on a more Uranus-like appearance. I believe this is from ammonia condensating out of the atmosphere at cooler temperatures but chemistry is really not my thing so I'm very open to being shown otherwise.
Here is a class 2-3 transitional texture derived from Kexitt's textures (which we can use):
Also a possible generic texture for terrestrial planets; it's just Mercury+Venus+Mars:
