FYI, the imposter planet as a 2D pixel shader on a backdrop is a godsend for those doing procedural universes where you have lots of planets. Due to memory and

FYI, the imposter planet as a 2D pixel shader on a backdrop is a godsend for those doing procedural universes where you have lots of planets. Due to memory and GPU bandwidth, I restrict my spherical cube-based planets to 1 instance and draw the nearest bodies using the backdrop technique. When in space, there’s a distance in the middle of two bodies where both are rendered as imposters, before settling on the nearest body for spherical quad-tree goodness. It’s not perfect but the illusion is near flawless. This also makes it rather trivial to add light physics to your camera lens for long distance galaxies and bodies. Since they are on a plane… such as when the moon comes up and looks bigger than it is, or a galaxy in the distance being warped by gravity.