A Radiant Being: The Sun Behind the Self-Care Card
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If the Planets Could Talk: How a Self-Care Idea Became a Blender Sun
If the Planets Could Talk: How a Self-Care Idea Became a Blender Sun
by Darren Palmer
🌌 Prologue — If the Planets Could Talk
The idea started as a joke during a conversation about identity. If humans can argue endlessly about labels, what would the planets say about theirs?
Somewhere between “Pluto deserved better” and a rant about categories, a sentence arrived that refused to leave:
It was funny—but it also felt true. It sounded like the kind of thing a tired human might whisper to themselves after a long day. A self-care affirmation wearing a spacesuit.
From that moment, the planets became more than distant spheres of rock and gas. They became a friend group with feelings, boundaries, bad days, and good lines.
🪐 1. Why Planets, Why Self-Care?
I’ve spent years writing about history, equality, and the way societies decide whose stories matter. That work is heavy. Important—but heavy. I needed a way to talk about care and identity that didn’t immediately turn into argument.
Most self-care messages are well-meaning, but they often feel like posters in a doctor’s waiting room: technically correct, emotionally flat. They tell you how you should feel instead of meeting you where you are.
Planets offered something different:
- Distance — The message comes from somewhere far larger than your to-do list.
- Playfulness — It’s hard to feel lectured by a glowing ball of plasma with opinions.
- Symbolism — Each planet already carries a personality: Saturn and boundaries, the Moon and phases, Neptune and hidden storms.
Turning those ideas into cards made sense. Cards are small, repeatable conversations. You can hold one, pin it, gift it, or slide it somewhere safe. It’s not an essay telling you how to live; it’s a planet quietly giving you permission.
🎨 2. “I Want to Create My Own Art”
At first, the plan was simple: write the quotes, pair them with nice stock images, and move on.
But every time I dropped a generic galaxy background behind the words, something felt wrong. The images were beautiful, but they weren’t mine. They didn’t know what the cards were trying to say. They were decoration, not part of the message.
AI images weren’t the answer either. They looked impressive at a glance, but they weren’t grounded in anything real. The physics was off, the symbolism was random, and the authorship was fuzzy. I didn’t want borrowed spectacle; I wanted honest craft.
That’s when the idea shifted from “find better art” to:
Not just pretty suns and worlds, but ones that actually behave like themselves. If the cards were going to speak with any authority, I wanted their universe to be real enough to deserve the conversation.
🌞 3. Enter Blender: Building a Real Sun
Blender offered something no image search could: control. If I could learn the tools, I could decide how the Sun is built, layer by layer. Structure first, spectacle later.
Mode 0 became the foundation: a simple, correct Sun. No over-saturation, no sci-fi glow. Just a sphere with believable scale, rotation, and light—something that could sit comfortably in a simulation or an educational project.
It doesn’t look like the posters we grew up with, and that’s the point. Before the creative flourishes, I wanted a Sun that respected reality. If Reality Universe is going to mean anything, it has to start with honesty.
🔥 4. From Accurate Sun to Reality Universe
Once Mode 0 was stable, Mode 1 could exist without guilt. This is the “show me what’s really happening” version: boiling granulation, colour shifts, the hint of a corona. Still built from the same honest structure, but now allowed to express itself.
This is where the idea of Reality Universe took hold. If I could build a Sun with different display modes—educational, cinematic, stylised—then I could do the same for planets, moons, and everything else.
Reality Universe isn’t just a cool name. It’s a promise to myself: whenever I exaggerate something for storytelling, there will be a quieter, accurate version sitting behind it, ready for anyone who wants the truth beneath the drama.
🧩 5. Modes, Controls, and the Craft Behind the Scenes
On the surface, switching from one Sun to the other is just a dropdown. Behind it sits a web of Geometry Nodes: mode compares, switches, joins, and a controller that decides which version you see.
It took a while—and more than one “why is everything invisible again?” moment—to get here. But that struggle was important. Somewhere between the broken wires and the eventual working toggle, I crossed the line from using Blender to actually understanding it.
That’s the quiet power of this project. The planets aren’t just set dressing for quotes; they’re teaching me how to build systems, not just pictures.
🃏 6. Returning to the Cards — A Sun with Something to Say
The early card mockup did its job: it proved the idea could work. But once the Sun itself became more refined, the card design needed to grow with it.
Now, when the Sun says, “I’m a radiant being,” it isn’t just a clever line. It’s backed by a model that actually understands what “radiant” means in physical terms. The metaphor and the physics finally live in the same place.
The plan is to grow this into a full “Solar Self-Care” set—cards, posters, and downloads where each planet offers a different kind of permission. Not to escape reality, but to see ourselves inside it with a little more kindness.
✨ 7. Art, Healing, and Building Worlds
This whole journey began with one silly sentence about a gas giant. It turned into a physically-grounded Sun, a universe project, and a new way of thinking about self-care.
Along the way I learned that:
- I can build far more than I thought, as long as I’m patient with the process.
- Realism and creativity are not enemies. One gives the other weight.
- Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for yourself is to turn a heavy idea into a gentler metaphor—and then treat that metaphor with the same respect you’d give to history or philosophy.
If anything in this project resonates with you—whether it’s the Sun, the cards, or the idea that even planets deserve better labels—I hope it nudges you towards your own version of world-building. Not necessarily in 3D software, but in whatever space lets you turn “what if…” into something real.
You don’t need permission to start creating your own universe. But if you’d like it anyway, consider this the Sun’s official statement: you’re allowed to be a radiant being too.
