Creating the scene was actually done rather quickly. Just added some primitives and added the patterns I created with JSplacement to the displacement channel. For the center sphere I used textures I created for a freebie terrain I created a while ago. Tweaking the overall look of the materials did require a little more time but overall... a quick process. In Photoshop I had some fun with the multipass channels I did render out with Vue. A Z-Depth channel was used to simulate a depth of field effect.

Here I did pretty much the same as before. The difference is that I tried to work with JSplacement maps in C4D to see what's possible there. There I created the circle objects to frame the sphere in the middle. In Vue I did set up the scene and lighting. Especially the lighting setup was fun to play with and created some very nice resuls.

The original images are 6000x6000 large and there is some really fine detail in them. Here two examples of how deep the details goes and enables the viewer to constantly find new and fun details.