WIP showcase of the efficiency of the texture system. Full path-tracing in Cycles with an RTX 3090.
A recent long-term project with lots more renders of its sister planets and moons to come!
This is based on an older procedural gas giant project from last year, you can find the textures to use for yourself here:
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/wbwY6/
In this project, the procedural texture is baked into an image and used in a parallax depth shader to simulate the differences in height the clouds have in a dense atmosphere. The atmosphere edge is simulated using a fresnel effect shader to blend the outer edge.
This is much more efficient for rendering than simulating this properly using volumetric scattering and absorption.