Mini Planet

Turn a 360 degree spherical panorama into a mini planet.

I like making panoramas, both from the ground as well as from the sky. Turning those into mini planets is good fun. Until recently I used an app on my phone for that, but it didn’t give me the control and quality of output I want. So here’s the solution: a Blender based setup that can render to the resolutions I need.

Download

How to Use

Follow these simple steps to get started:

1. Get an equirectangular image. If you don’t have one yourself, you can grab my pano to toy around.
2. Download panorama-to-mini-planet.blend, and open it in Blender 3.6 or newer.
3. In the image texture node (the big one) click the little folder icon and open your image.
4. Play around wiht the parameters in the ‘Mini Planet’ node.
5. Render the image and save it where you want.

Asset Browser

The ‘Mini Planet’ node group has been marked as asset. This means you can plonk panorama-to-mini-planet.blend in an asset library and use the node group from wherever you want.

For more info about this, check Blender’s asset libraries documentation.