Hmm... well think about this: the four examples of texture for terrestrial planets we have are:
Mercury: heavily cratered ball of dark-grey rock.
Venus: completely covered by yellow-white clouds. If you didn't know its size, then looking at a visual light photo you might think it was a gas giant.
Earth: Dark blue oceans, white polar caps, reddish-tan land, (but most of the land is green due to vegetation), lots of white clouds.
Mars: Reddish-brown and dark grey, with small polar caps.
All of these planets are in the distance range where the rocks do not glow and they are not covered by ice. However, due to idiosyncracies of their atmospheres (and in Earth's case hydrosphere and biosphere) they all look quite different.
You would also have to consider the effects of axis tilt and whether the planet is tidally locked. If there was life on land, but the parent star was of a different spectral class, vegetation might have a different color.
Some of my terrestrial planets include:
Tidally locked, close-in planet. The "light side" is molten.
Planet with an atmosphere that becomes supercritical at great depth. It appears deep blue, with swirling clouds.
Scorching hot planet covered by phosphorus sulfide clouds.
Planet similar to Venus but slightly cooler. The sulfuric acid rain doesn't evaporate on the way down, and the planet has oceans of the stuff.
Planet with a water ice crust and seas of liquid ammonia, with a methane-rich atmosphere filled with orange haze like on Titan, along with cirrus clouds of ammonia ice.
Ocean planet which is entirely dark blue except for white clouds.
Earthlike planet, but with a much higher sea level (over 90% of the surface is water) and an eccentric orbit which causes its polar caps to cover the entire surface at apsis, but retreat to only a little larger than Earth's at periapsis.
In other words: planet appearances would be very hard to predict. I advise making custom textures.
Topic: Planets (Read 4669 times)
